Stores came and went in Quarter Hill, but no one had expected Manganiel’s to close. The plant and garden megamart had been a staple of the town since 1980, winning numerous state “Shoppy” awards, including Best Nursery, Best Helpstaff, Best Inventory Design in a Large-Scale Floorspace, and Best Owner.
At least once a year, a developer from a major retail chain serenaded Kath Manganiel, offering her blinding amounts of money for her prime location in the commercial district. No one had been able to sway her until seventeen days ago, when Integrity operatives found her in her illegal tobacco garden and offered her an entirely different kind of bargain. She relinquished her store to the U.S. government, then promptly fled to Florida.
Now a bored young soldier prowled the aisles of the showroom, his fieldboots flecked with shriveled leaves and petals. Here on the surface, far above the solic haze, he was free to wear his light and hardy tempic armor. He almost felt bad for his comrades down below, lumbering around in those black metal chokesuits. Then again, they were actually getting to do something while he was stuck in some plant shop, reluctantly learning the difference between hydrangeas and hypericums.
The soldier paused at the end of Aisle 9 (PARTIAL SHADE PERENNIALS), lifted his face mask, and took a swig from his water bottle. Every watt of the store’s electricity was being funneled to the basement, killing all the fans and air conditioners. Worse, the sun was already starting to bleed in through the skyglass. Come noon, it was going to be a real ball-soaker in here.
A vibration tickled the soldier’s torso. He looked down at his chestplate and saw it dancing with milky ripples.
“What . . .”
He reached for his radio, just as two lily white hands bloomed out of the tempis and covered his mouth and nostrils. His body crashed into a ceramic planter, then thrashed about on the floor. After a minute of kicks and muffled cries, he finally fell still.
Amanda peeked around the corner and reeled him in with a tendril. Jonathan studied him over her shoulder. “Is he dead?”
She leaned in to check his breathing. “He’s alive.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“I might have overdone it,” she admitted. “You can’t deprive a brain of oxygen without risking—”
Amanda raised her head in alarm. She felt more tempis in the area: two armored figures behind the potted trees of Aisle 10.
She jumped in front of Jonathan. “Look out!”
The soldiers turned the corner and raised their rifles. Before they could shoot, they were hit by a pair of quick assailants. Hannah struck the back of their knees with a billy club while Melissa zapped their necks with a stun chaser. The soldiers slammed against the ground and stayed there.
The two women de-shifted, then dragged the soldiers up the aisle.
“You okay?” Jonathan asked them.
“We’re fine.” Melissa dropped her victim next to Amanda’s. “Sorry for the close call.”
“We had two more by the registers,” Hannah said. “They weren’t as easy.”
Amanda looked around. “I can’t feel any more of them.”
Melissa scanned the aisles through her thermal visor. Though the tempic armor made the soldiers easy for Amanda to detect, it also masked their heat signatures. Melissa could barely see them. All she knew was that Manganiel’s was located directly above the solic disseminator, which meant the power source was in here somewhere. Surely Gingold would have more than five men guarding it. Where were the rest?
She switched off her thermals and examined the suffocated soldier. “He’s breathing,” Amanda said. “I might have given him brain damage.”
“It’s all right. Whatever we do to these people can be reversed.”
“Not everything,” Jonathan reminded her.
“Yes, well . . .” Melissa eyed him guardedly. “Let’s do what we can to avoid fatalities.”
After one last thermal scan, she led Jonathan and the sisters down a stairwell. The basement stockroom had been completely redone since Integrity moved in, though “undone” might have been the better word for it. All the inventory had been shoved aside by bulldozers. Dirt and rubble lay scattered about in piles. Melissa looked to the center of the room and saw the fruits of the agency’s labor: an excavated gorge, twelve feet deep and lined with wooden scaffolds. All the light in the cellar seemed to come from it.
Jonathan studied the big square hole from a distance. “Well, that’s creepy as shit.”
Melissa shushed him, then activated her lumiflage. Her armor became cloaked in ambient images.
“I’ll be back,” she whispered. “Stay down and keep quiet.”
She crept her way to the gorge and peeked down over the edge. The place was filled with industrial equipment: substations, cooling towers, precipitators . . . but no generator. Six technicians in casual clothes flittered busily between consoles, a holstered gun at each of their hips.
Melissa traced a visual path along the maze of floor cables. The heaviest ones snaked to the north, into a wide scaffold tunnel at the farthest end of the pit. The device they were looking for must be in there, but how far did the passage go?
A glint in the distance caught Melissa’s eye. She magnified her visor display and saw faint gray figures moving around behind the dirt mounds. There were soldiers in the upper cellar, and they were doing their best to stay hidden.
They’re on high alert, Melissa realized. They know we’re—
A bullet struck the small of her back. Her armor’s battery exploded in a jet of sparks, killing her shifter as well as her chameleon cloak. Melissa barely had a moment to regain herself before three more soldiers fired at her. The first bullet missed. The second one careened off the side of her helmet. The third one hit her square in the chest.
Hannah peeked out of her hiding spot and saw Melissa fall backward into the gorge. A bullet whizzed past her head.
Jonathan pulled her back. “Get down!”
“They got Melissa!”
“How many are there?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see them!”
Amanda crouched behind a stack of debris, her eyes closed in concentration. She could only vaguely feel the tempis in the distance—eight, nine, maybe ten suits of armor, all scattered around the stockroom. They were moving so fast, they must have activated their shifters. And two of them were rushing toward—
“Hannah!”
The pair arrived before Hannah could even sense them. They skidded to a halt behind her and Jonathan, their rifle barrels raised mere inches behind their heads.
“No!”
Panicked, Amanda thrust her arms. If she’d had a split second more to formulate a strategy, she might have handled the soldiers more delicately. She could have paralyzed their trigger fingers, thrown them against a wall, crippled them or blinded them or closed up their airways.
But the moment she saw the gun at Hannah’s head, her thoughts went blank and the tempis took over. She went to the cold white place where Esis lived.
The soldiers yelped as their armored limbs locked firmly in place, immobilizing them. Hannah had no idea what was happening to them until their suits constricted with violent force. The sounds that came next would haunt her for the rest of her life: a pair of shrieks, a spurting gurgle, the most sickening crunch she’d ever heard. The men fell to the floor in dull, wet heaps. Blood dribbled out of the fibrous parts of their armor.
Shaken, Hannah jumped into blueshift and closed her eyes. She sensed eight temporal auras, all moving in the same direction. The squad was regrouping at the northern end of the cellar, no doubt to call for backup and to deliberate a new plan of attack. Amanda had just crushed two of their own like beer cans. This was a full-blown crisis.
Hannah checked on her sister, still staring at her victims in a state of trembling shock. She wouldn’t be snapping back into action anytime soon, and there was no way to bring Jonathan into the fight. The tempic armor made these enemies undroppable. They’d riddle him with bullets before he could even try.
She had to deal with the other eight soldiers herself.
Hannah traced her finger through the dirt on the floor, a quick and sloppy message for Jonathan: Stay down.
He had only just begun to look her way when she snatched a rifle from one of the dead soldiers and bolted into the darkness. Her targets were armed and armored and only slightly slower than her. Her only hope was to strike at them from the shadows, to keep them off-guard and guessing while she took them out one by one.
She hid behind a bulldozer and peeked through the hydraulics. A soldier crouched just thirty feet in front of her, back turned. Hannah’s stomach fluttered as she raised her rifle and looked through the scope. The crosshairs dawdled around the wires of his backpack shifter.
Please let this work. Please . . .
She squeezed the trigger with all her strength, but the thing was hopelessly jammed. If Melissa had been with her, she would have told her that Integrity didn’t like having their own weapons used against them. Every operative wore an electronic smartkey on their dominant hand, either as a ring or a subdermal implant. No agency gun would fire without one.
Cursing, Hannah searched the rifle for a safety switch, accidentally knocking the barrel against the bulldozer blade. A metallic clang echoed through the basement. The soldiers turned their heads in synch.
“Shit.”
Hannah gritted her teeth and doubled her speed, ignoring the hard spikes of resistance from her brain. She escaped the bulldozer just before a hail of gunfire tore fifty new holes in the chassis. Its windows shattered. Metal shards flew through the air. Only one of the soldiers—the lone female in the group—looked beyond the wreckage and saw a trail of Hannah’s dust.
She turned back to her teammates. “It’s a fast one! We got a sw—”
Hannah lunged from the shadows and struck her legs with her billy club. The armor was nothing but fiberweave in the back of the knees, blade-resistant but vulnerable to blunt force. At the right speed and angle, a swifter could break a kneecap from the other side.
The woman had only just begun to fall when Hannah looped around and clubbed another soldier on the back of the hand. While the tempis kept his bones from breaking, the shock of impact was enough to get him to drop his weapon. Hannah caught it and chucked it before her six remaining enemies could turn their rifles on her. Even at 20x, they moved like drowsy old men in her perceptions.
Keep going, Hannah urged herself. Maintaining this speed hurt like hell, but it was her only advantage. She couldn’t let up for a second.
She pivoted around the nearest soldier and yanked a pair of rubber cables from his shifter. His smoky aura dissipated. He froze like a statue in Hannah’s vision. One more down. Five to go.
You can’t keep this up, her higher functions warned her. These are trained killers. You’re just a washed-up actress.
Shut up.
Hannah doubled back and disabled another shifter. A frustrated soldier swung his fist at her head. She dodged it by inches and slammed her club against his helmet. He stumbled backward, a thick web of cracks on his visor.
Three left. A trickle of blood ran down Hannah’s nose, and she came dangerously close to smiling.
Washed-up actress, she scoffed. I’m the wind behind these people’s backs. I’m the whistling in their ears. I am a blade of steel and fire, and I will not be—
A piercing agony suddenly struck her in the frontal lobe, a pain like none she’d ever felt before. The wound had been inflicted twenty-six days earlier, on the night that Theo got dropped through the clock tower. Hannah had pushed her powers beyond their natural limits to save him.
Now, at last, her powers were pushing back.
Hannah stumbled as she struggled to collect herself. She felt a shifted presence in the back of her thoughts. One of her enemies was rushing her from behind.
She jumped to the left, but not quickly enough. The soldier’s nightstick slammed into her shoulder, the same one she’d dislocated on her very first day on this world. As the bone once again popped out of its socket, Hannah crashed to the ground and fell out of blueshift. She looked up at her assailants through a pained and teary wince. She’d been doing so well against them. Now it was all over.
“Fuck you,” she hissed. “You can all go f—”
The soldiers dropped their guns in unison, then raised their arms in a perfect V. Hannah scuttled away from them, mystified.
“What?”
She turned her head and saw her sister in the near distance, her skin covered in a rocky sheath of tempis. The crags on her brow were so pronounced that Hannah could only see shadows where her eyes should have been.
“Amanda?”
The soldiers arched their heads back, yelping.
“Amanda, wait—”
A loud crack reverberated through the basement, followed by a soldier’s scream. Hannah had no idea what her sister had done until it happened again: a violent twist of an enemy’s hand, a splintering of bone.
Holy shit, Hannah thought. She’s breaking their arms.
Amanda dropped the soldier to the floor, then snapped the wrists of the next one, and the next one, and the one after that. By the time she got to the eighth and last soldier, Hannah was sure she knew what Hell sounded like. The victims writhed atop each other, cursing and howling and swearing revenge.
“Shut up,” Amanda said. “Just shut up.”
She kneeled at Hannah’s side and examined her shoulder. Even her gentlest touch made her sister flinch in pain.
“It’s out of joint,” she told Hannah. “I’ll have to pop it back in.”
“Not here.” Hannah raised her good arm and ran her fingers down her sister’s face. “Take this off.”
Amanda dissolved the tempis and looked away. Hannah could see every bit of pain on her face, the thick streams of tears that rolled down her cheeks. She’d been crying nonstop since she’d crushed the two men, and Hannah didn’t have the heart to tell her the awful truth: that it got easier. The grief, the guilt, it all went away. She barely even remembered what Naomi Byers looked like.
She pressed her forehead to Amanda’s, while the soldiers behind them continued to writhe.
“It’s all right,” she said. “We’re all right.”
—
Melissa stood against the dirt wall, her hands raised, her sciatic nerve throbbing. Falling twelve feet in metal armor wasn’t especially good for her back, or the armor. But these were ancillary concerns, as there were currently six technicians holding her hostage. Three of them looked jittery enough to shoot at shadows. Two of them weren’t even holding their guns properly.
“Look at me,” said the oldest man in the group, a weak-chinned analyst with the beadiest eyes Melissa had ever seen. He reminded her of the old British caricatures of King George VII, with the two black dots in the middle of his face. Appropriate really, as this fellow seemed determined to play King of the Pit.
“I said look at me.”
Melissa wearily made eye contact. “What’s your name?”
“Shut up. I’m the one asking questions.”
A soldier wailed from the upper reaches of the cellar. King George flinched at the man’s agonized cry.
“What’s happening up there?” he asked Melissa. “What are they doing?”
“They’re breaking wrists, just as I advised them to do.”
“How the hell do you live with yourself?”
“I could ask you the same question,” Melissa said. “You’re waging war on American soil, imprisoning people who’ve never once broken the law.”
“You know damn well why we’re doing this!”
“Yes.” Melissa glared at him reproachfully. “Because you’re frightened little men, afraid of change. Afraid of anything that threatens your delicate dominance.”
King George stepped forward and pressed his gun to Melissa’s temple. She could tell from his body language that he wasn’t blustering. He was looking for an excuse to kill her.
“You think I’ll stand here and get lectured by you? You’re a goddamn traitor. If I plugged you right now, I bet—”
An electric substation disappeared into the dirt, tearing dozens of cables. Only Melissa and a technician saw it happen. The rest merely blinked at the glaring new gap in the console deck.
“What the hell—”
A computer fell next, then another one, then a cooling tower. The devices weren’t sinking into the ground. They were plummeting through it, like ghosts.
“That’s enough,” Jonathan yelled from above. “Drop the guns or I drop you.”
Melissa’s heart skipped a beat. She didn’t know Jonathan well enough to tell if he was bluffing. The man could obviously kill with a thought. But would he?
As another substation dropped through the earth, five of the technicians surrendered their sidearms. King George kept his gun against Melissa’s head.
“One more and I shoot your friend!”
“Friend?” Jonathan chuckled. “Buddy, I barely know her.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“He’s not,” Melissa confirmed. “We’ve only met once before.”
“But I like her well enough,” Jonathan said. “And you’re clearly a prick. So I’m giving you three seconds to throw down your gun before I make your arms fall off.”
The others took a step back as, one by one, their surrendered weapons vanished into the earth.
King George stood his shaky ground. “You’re lying.”
Jonathan sighed. “One . . .”
“I’ll shoot her! I mean it!”
“Two . . .”
Melissa grabbed George by the wrist and flipped him over her shoulder. He didn’t have a chance to catch his breath before her hard metal boot pressed down on his chest.
“Forgive me,” she said, “but I wasn’t sure if he’d really maim you, and I didn’t feel like finding out.”
“Go on,” George wheezed. “Kill me. That’s the only way you’ll—”
“Oh shut up.” Melissa released her foot, then shot him in the neck with her stun chaser. “Prat.”
She ordered the other techies against the wall, then bound their wrists with the bresin ties from her shoulder pack.
By the time she finished, Jonathan had reunited with the sisters. They made their way down the scaffold ramp. Melissa saw Hannah’s arm wrapped in Amanda’s jacket, an ad hoc sling.
“Is it broken?”
Hannah shook her head. “I’m fine.”
Melissa studied Amanda’s face. Clearly the older Given wasn’t fine, and it was easy to guess why. “How many?”
Amanda lowered her head. Hannah stood in front of her defensively. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It’ll matter very much to the agency. I assure you of that.”
“Let’s just find the generator,” Jonathan said. “Before they send backup.”
Melissa led the group to the far end of the pit, down a sloping tunnel of cables and lanterns that ended in a large chamber. A humming machine filled the majority of the space, a five-ton orb with gauges on one side and dozens of plugged cables on the other. Though the generator vibrated heavily enough to shake dirt from the walls, it didn’t sound much louder than the average table fan.
Jonathan walked around the metal sphere, his finger brushing against the surface. “So this is it, huh? I would have expected—”
“Jonathan!” yelled Hannah.
He paused where he stood. He’d been so distracted, he nearly stepped into a pit at the base of the generator. It was four feet wide and unnaturally smooth, as if Integrity had drilled through the world with a laser. A cable as thick as a velvet rope extended from the generator and spilled deep into the abyss.
Jonathan stepped away from the edge. “Wow. Does that thing—”
“Yes,” said Melissa. “All the way down to the solic disseminator.”
“Can’t I just drop the wire?”
She shook her head. “They could replace it in minutes. Best to be sure.”
“Okay. Stand back.”
Jonathan needed a full minute of concentration to turn the generator intangible. As the sphere fell through the earth, its severed wires flopped to the ground, hissing and crackling before going dormant. The disseminator cable retracted into the pit.
“Is that it?” Hannah asked Melissa. “Did we do it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean?”
Melissa pulled her transceiver out of her shoulder bag. “The generator was built by Dalton, a British manufacturer. They’re for wartime use, which means they’re loaded with contingencies. If the disseminator’s also a Dalton, then it probably has a backup battery inside of it.”
Hannah scowled at her. “So it’s still pumping solis down there.”
“If it has a battery, then yes. It would have enough power for at least forty more minutes of operation.”
Jonathan smacked a wall. “Goddamn it!”
“That’s too long,” Amanda said. “We have to do something.”
Melissa nodded. “I agree. But before we decide our next step, I need to know for sure.”
She turned on her radio and raised it to her lips. “Theo, can you hear me?”
No response. She tested the device for damage before trying again. “Theo, are you there?”
The speaker came to life with a garbled hiss. “Who is this?”
The sisters and Jonathan looked at each other, baffled. The man on the line was most definitely not Theo, though his low, raspy voice was easy enough to recognize. They all had a long and tortured history with him.
Amanda plucked the radio out of Melissa’s hand. “Rebel?”
“Oh, hey, Given. We were just talking about you.”
“What are you doing? Where’s Theo?”
Rebel puttered about the warrens, in a wide tunnel junction just fifteen feet below Freak Street. He cradled Theo’s radio on his shoulder while placing a half pound of putty explosive in an air vent.
“He’s fine,” he assured Amanda. “We got him to the shelter.”
“What about the others?”
Rebel looked over his shoulder. Zack sat against the wall, awake but only marginally lucid. Mercy grabbed a painkiller patch from her medkit and pressed it to his neck.
“Trillinger’s in good hands,” Rebel said. “Heath ran off. Haven’t seen any of the others.”
Jonathan snatched the radio from Amanda. “What do you mean, he ran off?”
“Is that Christie?”
“What’d you do to him?”
“Saved his ass is what I did. Kid wasn’t grateful.”
“I swear to God, if you hurt him—”
“It’s not me you need to worry about, brother. You got bigger problems.”
Melissa took her radio back. They didn’t have time to trade banter with this fool.
“Rebel, listen to me. We just deactivated the power supply for the solic disseminator. Do you feel any change down there?”
Rebel looked to Mercy, the clan’s foremost expert in solis. She grimly shook her head.
“Nope. Still swimming in it.”
Melissa rubbed her brow. “Damn it.”
Hannah leaned in to the radio. “Rebel, what were you talking about? Why does Jonathan have bigger problems?”
Rebel stuck a detonator onto the explosive charge. “I’ve seen the future, Given. These soldiers are just a temporary problem. When the Pelletiers get here, and you can bet your ass they will, the real pain begins. They’re coming to clean house. All the folks who’ve wrenched up their plans, all the obstacles in their path. I’m on that list, and so’s your boyfriend. Guess they really don’t like the two of you together.”
Hannah’s face went pale. “You’re lying.”
“Believe what you want, but it’s happening. If you see Azral coming, Christie, I only got one piece of advice.”
Rebel lifted the air vent cover and secured it with a click. “Run.”
Jonathan closed his eyes, cursing. “What about Zack?” Amanda asked Rebel.
A brief silence passed. Amanda raised the handset. “Rebel, what about Zack?”
Rebel took a long sip from a water bottle before answering. “Esis is coming for him.”
“No!”
“It’s all right,” Rebel assured her. “We’ll be ready for her.”
“Wait. What are you talking about?”
“Gotta go.”
“Rebel!”
Amanda dropped the radio and looked down at her hands. They were trembling and spotted with tempis.
“I have to get down there.”
“Amanda . . .”
“I have to stop her.”
Melissa held her by the shoulders. “Amanda, listen to me. Our work here isn’t done. If we want to save those people down below, we have to finish what we started. I can’t do it without you.”
Hannah gestured at Jonathan. “What about us. What do we do?”
Melissa rummaged through her shoulder pack and pulled out three more items: a keycard, a scrap of paper, and a handheld computer. She loaded a map of Quarter Hill on the screen and marked a digital waypoint.
“You two need to leave as fast as you can. Follow this map to Irwin Sunder’s house. You’ll find a false thermostat in his wine cellar. The keycard and access code will get you back to the underland.”
“Not if the power’s still out,” Jonathan said.
“We’ll get it back,” Melissa assured him. “Just be careful. There are soldiers all over town.”
“What about you and Amanda?” Hannah asked.
Melissa jerked her head at the yawning pit. “That’s our way back.”
Jonathan stared down the hole, horrified. “Are you kidding me?”
“Someone has to destroy the disseminator. It’s our only hope.”
Hannah shook her head. “Uh-uh. You’re not dragging my sister down that—”
“Hannah.” Amanda squeezed her good arm. “She’s right. We can’t wait for the battery to die.”
“What if your tempis craps out halfway? What if they drop a bomb?”
“We’ll be all right,” Amanda insisted. “Just go.”
While Melissa shed her broken armor, Hannah steeled herself for another temporal shift. Her head and shoulder still ached like crazy, and she couldn’t get Azral out of her mind. Still, the road ahead felt easy compared to Amanda’s. The woman had already been through hell today, and now she had to go deeper.
She wrapped her sister in a one-armed hug. “Be careful. Please.”
“I will,” Amanda said. “Stay safe, both of you.”
Hannah climbed onto Jonathan’s back and launched them both into blueshift. Loose cables fluttered as they made a quick escape.
Amanda looked to Melissa. “How exactly are we going to destroy the disseminator? If we get too close—”
“We won’t. We just have to get within dropping distance.”
Melissa stripped down to her tights and shock padding. Amanda watched her closely as she grabbed her grenade belt.
“You can’t be serious.”
“You wanted to save everyone,” Melissa said. “This is how we do it.”
Amanda peered down the well with heavy eyes. She’d never made a tempic rappel before, much less an eight-hundred-foot one. If she lost her concentration, even for a moment . . .
“Two,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“You asked me how many soldiers I killed back there. The answer is two.”
Melissa clasped the grenade belt around her waist, expressionless. “I’ve killed four people in the line of duty.”
“Criminals,” Amanda guessed. “Not federal agents.”
“These agents are criminals. Don’t ever forget that.”
Amanda nodded absently. “I’m just thinking about my people. Zack . . .”
“We’ll help them,” Melissa said. “Just get us down there.”
Amanda grew a willowy white tendril from her palm, then pulled Melissa into an embrace. The tempis snaked around their bodies, binding them together.
“You believe in God?” Amanda asked.
Melissa thought about it a moment before answering. “Can’t say I do. But then I didn’t believe in chronokinesis either, so what do I know?”
Amanda formed a strong tempic clamp around the mouth of the well, then sighed over Melissa’s shoulder.
“You’re a good woman.”
“So are you,” Melissa said. “If the afterlife works like the Christians believe, then I have no doubt you’re going where the good people go.”
Amanda wasn’t as sure about that. Her faith in God had become shakier than ever. She feared that one more trauma would send her into a dark place, where people like her became monsters like Esis.
Melissa tightened her grip on Amanda. “Okay. Let’s do this before we lose our nerve.”
She and Amanda drew a simultaneous breath before plunging into the pit. They disappeared into the murky depths, then began their long trip back to the underland.