Holiday pulls a large plastic box from her pack. Her fingers pause over the latches.
She opens the plastic box to reveal a metal cylinder with a spinning ball of mercury at its center. I stare at the device. If the Society caught her carrying it, she’d never see daylight again. Vastly illegal. I eye the gravLift’s display on the wall. Ten levels to go. Holiday grips a remote control for the cylinder. Eight levels.
Will Cassius be waiting? Aja? The Jackal? No. They would be on their ship, preparing for dinner.
The Jackal would be living his life. They won’t know the alarm is for me. And even when they do, they’ll be delayed. But there’s enough to fear even without one of them coming. An Obsidian could rip these two apart with his bare hands. Trigg knows. He closes his eyes, touching his chest at four points to make a cross. A wedding band glints softly in the low light. Holiday minds the gesture, but doesn’t do the same.
“This is our profession,” she says quietly to me. “So swallow your pride. Stay behind us and let Trigg and I work.”
Trigg cracks his neck and kisses his gloved left ring finger. “Stay close. Nut to butt, sir. Don’t be shy.”
Three levels to go.
Holiday readies a gas rifle in her right hand and chews intensely on her gum, left thumb on the remote control. One level to go. We’re slowing. Watching the double doors. I loop Victra’s legs in my armpits.
“Love you, kiddo,” Holiday says.
“Love you too, babydoll,” Trigg murmurs back, voice tight and mechanical now.
I feel more afraid than I did when I lay encased in a starShell in the chamber of a spitTube before my rain. Not just afraid for me, but for Victra, for these two siblings. I want them to live. I want to know about South Pacifica. I want to know what pranks they pulled on their mother. If they had a dog, a home in the city, the country…
The gravLift wheezes to a halt.
The door light flashes. And the thick metal doors that separate us from a platoon of the Jackal’s elite hiss open. Two glowing stunGrenades zip in and clamp to the walls. Beep. Beep. And Holiday pushes the device’s button. A deep implosion of sound ruptures the elevator ’s quiet as an invisible electromagnetic pulse ripples out from the spherical EMP at our feet. The grenades fizzle dead. Lights go black in the elevator, outside it. And all the Grays waiting beyond the door with their hi-tech pulse weapons, and all the Obsidians in their heavy armor with their electronic joints and helmets and air filtration units, are slapped in the face with the Middle Ages.
But Holiday and Trigg’s antiques still work. They stalk forward out of the elevator into the stone hall, hunched over their weapons like evil gargoyles. It’s slaughter. Two expert marksmen firing short bursts of archaic slugs at point-blank range into squads of defenseless Grays in wide halls.
There is no cover to take. Flashes in the corridor. Gigantic sounds of high-powered rifles. Rattling my teeth. I freeze in the elevator till Holiday shouts at me, and I rush after Trigg, hauling Victra behind me.
Three Obsidians go down as Holiday lobs an antique grenade. Whooomph. A hole opens in the ceiling. Plaster rains. Dust. Chairs and Coppers fall through the hole from the room above, crashing down into the fray. I hyperventilate. A man’s head kicks back. Body spins to the ground. A Gray flees for cover down a stone hall. Holiday shoots her in the spine. She sprawls like a child slipping on ice.
Movement everywhere. An Obsidian charges from the side.
I fire the pistol, aim horrible. The bullets skitter off his armor. Two hundred kilograms of man raises an ionAxe, its battery dead, but edge still keen. He ululates his kind’s throaty war chant and red mist geysers from his helmet. Bullet through the skull-helm’s eye socket. His body pitches forward, slides. Nearly knocks me off my feet. Trigg’s already moving to the next target, driving metal into men as patiently as a craftsman driving nails into wood. No passion there. No art. Just training and physics.
“Reaper, move your ass!” Holiday shouts. She jerks me down a hall away from the chaos as Trigg
follows, hurling a sticky grenade onto the thigh of an unarmored Gold who dodges four of his rifle shots. Whoomph. Bone and meat to mist.
The siblings reload on the run and I just try not to faint or fall. “Right in fifty paces, then up the stairs!” Holiday snaps. “We’ve got seven minutes.”
The halls are eerily quiet. No sirens. No lights. No whir of heated air through the vents. Just the clunk of our boots and distant shouts and the cracking of my joints and the rasping of lungs. We pass a window. Ships, black and dead, fall through the sky. Small fires burn where others have landed.
Trams grind to a halt on magnetic rails. The only lights that still run are from the two most distant peaks. Reinforcements with tech will soon respond, but they won’t know what caused this. Where to look. With camera systems and biometric scanners dead, Cassius and Aja won’t be able to find us.