Lazarus was trying to neutralize me. I only had a minute or so before my hearing returned. Then I’d be lost to his song, and we’d both be lost to this place. I tried to talk to him, to coax him into stopping, but I doubted he heard me. I couldn’t hear me. I only knew I was talking from the feel of my muscles moving in my throat.
I carried him swiftly down the corridor, toward the little infirmary we’d passed earlier. He didn’t kick, or squirm, or try to fight. He was used to being overpowered. I guessed that the adults here, our mother included, had manhandled him often.
I fumbled through the glass medicine cabinets. All were locked. I smashed my fist through them, one at a time (cutting my hand badly, but, in my panic and desperation, I hardly noticed), until I found what I was looking for. Tranquilizer. The soldiers’ last resort to stop Lazarus if he went wild on them. They probably would have sent in someone wearing ear plugs to administer it. I hated to do this, but I hated being caught and killed even more.
And the soldiers would “just” kill me. They would have worse in store for Lazarus.
I’d already done one unforgivable thing today. My hands trembled as I plunged the syringe into the vial and drew the plunger up. Lazarus was propped on my shoulder, facing away. He couldn’t see what I was doing. Lucky him. I jabbed the needle into his rear and pushed the plunger down.
I held him until he stopped trying to sing. Eventually, he went limp.
I’d had no choice. I couldn’t have trusted him around me anymore. Even, especially, while I was trying to save us.
I had never felt so alone.
• • •
And I wouldn’t feel that alone ever again.
The chaos of Pearson’s compound dwindled away. A roar like a waterfall plastered my hair to my scalp. A freezing wind pelted me from above – a half second before a spotlight caught me.
In checking all my angles, I’d made an amateur mistake. I’d forgotten to look up.
I did now.
The wind wasn’t from rotors. The sound wasn’t a police copter. A Wakandan airship burned through the night sky, all shining running lights and billowing thrusters.
It was shockingly close. Too close. The airship didn’t hang above the buildings. It clove between them. Another few dozen feet to its right and its starboard wing would have clipped the office building I’d just dived out of.
The airship was heaving toward the church. Its nose angled steeply downward.
The furious wind had come from its thrusters. While coasting on hover engines, Shoon’kwa’s airship used compressed gas jets for fine maneuvering. The biting cold of the gale was from more than the Chicago winter. The pressurized exhaust flash-cooled as it expanded. Dangerous to breathe too much of it in. It was a nitrogen gas mixture, not overtly toxic – but it contained no oxygen.
Shoon’kwa was taking her airship as close to the church as she dared. Its nose nearly brushed the brickwork. But, at her angle of approach, her ventral bow thrusters were pointed directly at the spreading fire.
The fire billowed against the wind, mushroomed higher, licked across the church’s walls, and then – all at once – guttered and died. Starved of oxygen.
“I finished those repairs faster than I’d anticipated,” Shoon’kwa’s voice said in my headset.
My heart pounded against my ribcage. It was very much a struggle to keep from showing how relieved I felt. But only for a moment. Anger swiftly overwhelmed relief. I said, “You’ve been listening to us this whole time.”
“I happened to be in the neighborhood.”
“One of these days, you and I are going to have a chat about what it means to be on a team. And keeping your team leader informed.”
“I can turn around, if you would like.” Her voice was icy.
“No,” Rachel and Inez said at once.
“Mark it on your calendar, because it’s going to happen,” I said. I was serious. None of the problems that had forced us to keep the airship away had vanished. There were lots of organizations around, heroic and otherwise, who would be taking a special interest in all this now.
I had a hard time staying irritated at someone who’d just pulled my butt out of the fire, literally.
Shoon’kwa was a teenager. She wasn’t used to working on a team. She’d been exiled from her home, been left with nothing and no one to trust. Hell, the first time we’d met, she’d hired me for a bounty hunt and I’d double-crossed her, and we’d ended up getting into a fist fight. She’d gotten used to withholding trust, acting independently.
Like the rest of us, she’d always felt alone. And, also like the rest of us, it would take her a long time to learn that she didn’t have to. All of us had left home, or been kicked out, for one reason or another.
• • •
Another searchlight swept over me. I shielded my eyes. Her airship spawned dozens of them. The searchlights wheeled across the compound, guided by the airship’s sensors and inboard AI, locking on any significant source of body heat and movement. Myself included. But also Pearson’s people – the fire teams crouched by the church and other buildings, and the gunmen by the gates. There were more people out than I realized. Some of the gunmen started shooting, uselessly, at the airship.
“Get that damn light off me!” I told Shoon’kwa.
It took Shoon’kwa a few seconds to find me, override the AI keeping the spotlight pinned on me. I lowered my hand. Thanks to my quick thinking, I’d preserved my night vision.
The same couldn’t have been said for the nearest of Pearson’s fire teams. A harried, wild-eyed young man and woman were crouched by the church’s far corner, still working furiously to unpack their incendiaries. They were fumbling, reaching for things that weren’t there. They must have looked directly into Shoon’kwa’s lights.
I spotted a stone against the church’s wall, seized it, and threw. The stone cracked across the young man’s head. He tumbled into his partner. She wavered, but managed to stay on her knees. Thanks to her night blindness, she never saw me. Never had a chance to duck the boot to her head.
They had not stopped working, even under the spotlights. Nor had the other fire teams. The gunmen at the gates had not stopped firing. Bullets pinged off the airship’s hull, but most of the gunmen were still firing into the police cars arrayed outside. We still had our work cut out for us.
• • •
With Lazarus, I’d only had so many hands. I’d had no choice but to carry him over my shoulder. It left him more vulnerable, but it was the only way I could keep my gun in one hand and still be able to open doors with the other. Holding him and a gun at the same time did not feel responsible, but I had no idea what responsibility was any more. Should I have left him behind? Given him back to Beatrice’s followers?
I lost track of where I was in those twisting underground tunnels. I tried to follow the path I’d taken to get from here to the incinerator, but everything looked different, and my head was spinning. Part of Lazarus’s song must have gotten through to me. I wasn’t only alone, but lost.
The smell of blood wormed its way into my nostrils. I couldn’t tell whose. I’d spilled so much of it. Eventually, I found my way back to the incinerator room, and its caked-in stink of ash and filth and smoke. Maybe it was the after-effects of Lazarus’s song making me sick, but the smell made me gag. I almost threw up in the corner.
Some things sear themselves into your memory hotter than anything else, even the things you couldn’t imagine forgetting. Like a face that had, at one time, been the most important one in your life. I never wanted to remember that smell, but it stayed with me.
My palm was numb where the recoil from my pistol kept punching it. I didn’t fire to kill, although I’m sure I killed along the way.
I’d hated to tranquilize Lazarus. If he hadn’t been trying to control me, I wouldn’t have. But I was glad he wasn’t awake to keep watching this.
He would never understand. He would never recover from what he had seen me do.
• • •
The ear-splitting thunder of Shoon’kwa’s thrusters, and the shock of her airship’s searchlights, had temporarily stemmed the press of people at the church’s entrance. The awe would only last so long. But we had a minute to work with that we hadn’t had before.
I bent to check on the young man whose head I’d cracked with the rock. He stirred muzzily, but didn’t seem to see me. He’d need a hospital stay, at the very least. So would a lot of the people crowded into that church, no doubt – overheating, exhaustion, malnutrition, abuse.
“I hope we’ve got someone besides more people with guns coming this way,” I said.
“I’ve already placed the calls,” Rachel said. “Ambulances on the way.”
Rachel was exquisite, as always. In spite of all this, I smiled. I didn’t know how she was convincing the city’s emergency services to send as many medical first responders as we would need. If anyone could have finessed it, though, it was her.
Another of Pearson’s fire teams was setting up incendiaries by a door that looked like a side exit. Three armed escorts stood with them, gaping at Shoon’kwa’s airship. They were pinned under one of her searchlights, night-blind. They didn’t notice me darting around the corner and charging until I’d already disarmed one of them and broken the next man’s elbow.
The third guard, a pale woman who looked like she hadn’t seen the sun in months, was faster on her feet. She kicked out my ankle and, while I stumbled, raised her weapon. My reflexes were only just fast enough to deflect her arm.
Her gunshot pierced the shoulder of one of the two people unpacking the incendiaries. I ripped the gun from her with one hand, whirled around, and smashed my elbow into the back of her head. Not enough to knock her out, but it must have scared the hell out of her. She bolted. So did the other guards, and the two members of the fire team were right behind them. The one who’d been shot in the shoulder staggered, but kept up with them. Shoon’kwa’s spotlights chased after them, leaving me in darkness.
Another fire sparked below one of the dorm buildings. In that flash of light, I saw Inez plunge into the pair of fanatics who’d set it, fists swinging, her face twisted with rage. Relief flooded my veins, chilling the aches and pains of fighting.
Shoon’kwa’s airship pivoted, and rose on a column of thruster jets. Carefully, she maneuvered her airship along the rooftops, toward the new fire.
More gunfire rattled off near the gates, interrupted by a pair of heavier thunderclaps. Flashbangs. They would have blinded me if I’d been looking. I counted seconds under my breath before checking it out.
The flashbangs had fallen right in the middle of the cultists who’d opened fire on the police cars. Still pinned under Shoon’kwa’s lights, they’d fallen out of their cover, or just rolled on the ground. Some of them had even dropped their weapons.
A pale blur raced along the edges of the spotlight. White Fox. She moved faster than I could track – which was how I knew it was her.
As a kumiho, White Fox may have been superhumanly fast, but she was still as vulnerable to bullets as a normal human. She’d hurtled right into the line of fire. Or what should have been the line of fire. But none of the police officers outside the gate were firing back.
Black Widow crouched behind one of their armored car doors, her hands raised, palms flat. The officers must have recognized her as an Avenger. She’d taken charge of half a dozen strangers with practiced efficiency, and was coordinating a battle plan.
One of the dazed fanatics tried to raise his weapon. White Fox slammed his head into the dirt and kicked the gun from his hand. Another man, across the yard, tried to aim at her. She opened her mouth. I couldn’t hear her voice from so far away, but I knew what she was doing, and it still sent a shiver across my back. A kumiho’s mesmeric ability was small compared to, say, Lazarus’s, but it was enough. The fanatic stopped. His eyes went wide, his jaw slack. The grip of his pistol slipped from his hand.
Outside, Black Widow pointed at one of the parked police cars and waved ahead. The car’s driver gunned its engine, leapt forward, and smashed into the gate. The chain lock snapped as the car crashed through.
Black Widow charged through the gates, leapt over the police car’s hood, and slid into the compound, a half-dozen police officers right behind her. They spread out among the fallen gate guards, rapidly disarming those who’d clung to their weapons.
No one other than me was near the church. All the people inside were my responsibility.
The side door that Pearson’s guards had been watching, and that his fire team had been trying to set alight, had jarred open a crack. A slim column of light spilled out. I peered in and saw a throng of people – mottled hair, terrified faces. Some were visibly praying. I had never seen a crowd like this jammed in so tightly.
Shoon’kwa’s lights pouring through the windows, and the roar of her thrusters, had halted the stampede. But their shock wouldn’t last forever. And Shoon’kwa had taken her airship to some other part of the compound.
Nobody was pushing through this door yet. Either they hadn’t noticed it or they’d been warned away from it. They’d find it soon. Now that the thunder of Shoon’kwa’s thrusters was diminishing, and the crowd was starting to stir. Before long, they’d be crushing themselves to get to this exit or any other.
I couldn’t let myself think. Thinking was hesitation. Hesitation meant a stampede, and that would mean death. There were children in there Lazarus’s age. And younger.
I took a deep breath, took a step back, and started running.