Call Forth the Waves (16 page)

“Back up,” I ordered, but Ollie had serious issues when it came to taking orders from teenage girls. We were going to have to do this a different way. “I gave you a chance,” I reminded him.

I summoned Flame. Ollie flinched, as did the crowd. Thank you, primal fear.

“You claim you’re here to help us, and then threaten us?” he complained.

“We came here because we were being chased. We helped because you needed it. My golem isn’t a threat; he’s a guard dog. Stay back and he’ll leave you alone.”

“I say you sneeze and let the bird
accidentally
fry him,” Jermay said.

“That gets my vote,” Winnie added. She was no longer tearing at her clothes to show off her scars, and the Level-Five shading had left her eyes, but we were still miles from calm.

“No,” Nola said. “Baba wouldn’t want that. Let them have their fit. There’s nothing they can do to you or any of us.”

“We can do plenty.” A woman separated from the crowd and stood between Flame and Ollie.

“There are more of us—”

“—than there are of you.”

Two others joined her, one on either side. I could feel them pulling at my phoenix, almost like they were trying to pluck his feathers. They were pyrokinetic, like Evie, and trying to wrest control of my golem away from me, but I doubted any of them were capable of doing it. I’d never seen an elemental outside my family create a golem. They were tied to us.

“Can you do
this
?” I stomped my foot, copying a trick I’d seen my sister Nim use when she was looking for the water source she needed to do her act. The force went through the ground and into the pipes below, snaked its way to the nearest spigot, and gushed out as my shining sailfish. The fish shot across the quad, knocking the trio of pyros to the ground. It rose and floated in midair, backed by a surge of water, waiting to be set loose.

Now we had two golems standing sentry.

“Don’t push me,” I said.

The commotion had caught Anise’s attention. She and Birch arrived at a run.

The strangled feeling that had kept me awake late into the night returned, dragging a reality-shattering wave behind it. We were at the brink of something worse than a community squabble, and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

“It’s collapsing!” Nafiza shouted. She ducked, protecting her head from nonexistent debris. Whatever I was feeling, she felt it, too. “Falling stars still fly. You have to catch the stones.” She dove for something, landing at the edge of the walkway before staring at her hands as if it had slipped through her fingers. “Too late.”

She split my focus, which was already compromised from maintaining both golems. The air around me began to vibrate, shaking loose a fall of micro-particles that sifted into the shape of a lynx.

Three golems.
I hadn’t called for the last one; it appeared on its own.

I was coming apart. Each elemental representation tore out of me, leaving me weaker while it was outside my body. I’d never had an air golem manifest, but if one decided to, I was sure it would put me on my face.

Don’t fall,
I begged the stars.
Don’t fall. Stay where you are.

The chances that I caused the disaster Nafiza saw in tandem with Winnie were increasing.

Flame and the sailfish were easy enough to handle. I drew them together, forcing them to cancel each other out and disappear into harmless steam. The lynx was the problem; it was growing. Normally the size of a large dog, it had already passed horse on its way to a bulk that could rival Anise’s Kodiak. Spurred on by rage and nerves, it grew bigger and bigger until its own size did it in. I couldn’t hold it together, so it burst into piles of freshly sifted dirt.

“Time to go.” Nafiza turned her face to the sky, tracking something I couldn’t see because there was nothing there. She was out of step. Whatever she saw hadn’t happened yet. “I
see
you. Now I go home. That’s the order. Thank you.”

She smiled at Winnie and walked away.

“Please tell me she didn’t just say what I think she did,” Winnie said.

If this was how she’d
seen
Winnie, then this was the moment of destruction. We were standing in it, and my uneasy feeling was making a lot more sense.

“Nothing’s happening,” Esther said. “Why isn’t anything happening?”

Anticipation was a fear unto itself, one worse than fire. The people on the Mile had dreaded this day for so long, they’d all built up expectations of how it would go. They were waiting for that sum of their fears to grow wings and fly. A great and terrible beast that would blot out the sun and crush their bones beneath its feet.

Trouble was rarely that obvious, and on the occasions when it was, there were reasons it could be so bold.

“Does anyone else hear that?” Birch asked.

A grating whistle filled the air, followed by a metal canister launched high along the trajectory that Nafiza’s gaze had followed seconds before. When the canister reached a point above the square, it stopped and hung suspended, rotating slowly.

“Are those fireworks?” Esther asked, squinting for a better look.

No one shot fireworks in broad daylight, especially not a city in hiding.

“That’s military grade,” Anise said. “Commercial casing, but no markings. Even from this distance, we should be able to see ID numbers stenciled on to say who built it.”

Civilian fireworks were watered-down dynamite. Their range wouldn’t allow them to go high enough to crest the Mile. That canister had come from too shallow an angle to originate on the ground. Whoever set that thing off did it from close by.

Another whistle announced a second canister, and then a third, each rising from different sides. They formed a loose triangle, spinning to align their faces. A thin blue laser shot out from one, linking it to another.

“No,” Birch whispered. “No, no, no. Not here.”

“Do you recognize it?” I asked.

“It’s Commission tech. I’ve never seen one out of its crating, but I think it’s a scanner.”

“Impossible,” Esther argued. “We’ve got sensor buoys surrounding the rim in every direction. They’d pick up a vessel.”

“They didn’t pick us up,” Anise pointed out.

“That’s because the golems are too small,” Winnie said. “Their power drive has a different signature from a propulsion-and-lift system. The buoys have to make allowances for the occasional weather balloon or other high-flying oddity, so they screen by size and composition. Those canisters could have slipped through easily. The launch point could be outside the buoys.”

“Penn? Can you extend the sensor range from here?” my sister asked.

“Not without an access point. Where do the buoys transmit to? I can use the signal.”

That was how I took out the Commission armada at Nye’s Center.

Another laser connected the second unit to the third. Once the triangle was complete, all three beams met at a point in the middle. A spray of blue pulses blanketed the square and everyone in it.

“They’re spiking us!” Birch shouted. “Nobody move!”

CHAPTER 14

Birch had made a classic mistake. You never shout out trouble in front of a crowd unless you want an immediate reaction. They’ll either revolt or retreat, and the people on the square weren’t angry enough to revolt, so they took the other option. They ran in every direction at once, and into the new fixtures the Mile had built that they weren’t used to, and into each other. A spontaneous slapstick routine at the worst possible moment.

At least some of them remembered to call for their kids before they took cover.

“You led them right to us,” Esther said before she charged into the fray with the rest of them. Ollie had already gone.

“We’ve got to get Birdie and Dev back here,” Winnie said.

“Don’t move.” Birch grabbed her to stop her from running off. He didn’t get physical with people very often, but he was holding tight enough that the material of her shirt pulled at her shoulder. “Those things can pick up vibrations.”

“The Mile has evac procedures in place, but we need to be at the house,” she argued.

Birch yelled, “Stop!” but he couldn’t crack the decibels to be heard over the crowd. He waved his arms and even tried putting himself in the middle of the walk, but people went around him, branching off toward the Mile’s different neighborhoods. “Stop moving!”

“We’ve been painted by a Commission disco ball,” Jermay said. “I think it’s a little late for a game of freeze tag to save the day. They’re here. What’s plan B?”

“Shut it down,” Anise said. “If they’re spiking us, they’re still searching, and that means they only have a general location. That light show’s meant to cause a panic so they can pinpoint an exact location. Go dark before they lock on to the tech and follow it in.”

I stumble-ran across the square and pried the plate off the power cells with my bare hands. I had no intention of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy or watching the Mile crumble through my fingers. I’d seen enough destruction.

“Off!” I shouted at each system as the threads of my connection reached them. I’d cut everything but the engines keeping us aloft. “Off! Stop!”

The systems responded with surprise, a level of awareness that surprised
me
. Machines were supposed to respond to commands, not question them.

“We’re in danger. Those beacons are a threat.” I talked to the systems like I would a creeper light, being as precise and simple as possible. Emotion was an electrical impulse in the brain; surely it would translate into circuits. I told them to hide away so no one could find them.

Generators all over the Mile groaned in protest at being made to halt, but they followed orders. A thousand micro-plugs pulled from their sockets. We were left with the sound of wind and running feet beneath the spike’s flashing blue lights. I tried to minimize the impact of the engines in the surrounding space, checking for ways to dampen or mask their presence.

Even at their lowest settings, they were power hogs audible without equipment. I could cut off a few of them and rely on redundancy to keep us in the air, but if I picked the wrong ones or killed too many, it would mean an instant death spiral. The Mile was too massive. It would destabilize and fall fast, and it wouldn’t recover.

“There has to be a way to do this,” I told myself. I tried mapping another route through the circuitry, searching for a configuration that would put us in the clear.

My mental ringmaster announced my new trick: escape the labyrinth.
A real nail-biter of an act, set to a clock that’s ready to chime my doom.

“You’re going to have to walk me through it,” I added. The central processor for the Mile was complex as any brain. Neurosurgery without a map was never a good idea.

Everything started off well. The last firewall crashed down on cue. The security measures around the engines materialized in my head. I tapped five turbines, turning them off, but on the sixth, the energy flow hiccupped. It looped backward over what should have been a one-way trail and flowed into my right hand. An echo of my own voice ordered “Stop” so loud and hard I felt it like a punch to the chest. A brutal grip pinched my shoulder. My arm fell numb and useless at my side. I held it with my left hand to reassure myself it was still there. It felt like it had been erased.

“What happened?” Jermay asked. He put his arm around my waist to make sure I didn’t tip over.

“I don’t know. I can’t move my arm.” But right then, it didn’t matter. Other things were more important. “Was it enough?”

The blue lights from the spike twirled faster. What had been snowy dots on our skin and the ground blurred into stripes.

“Don’t go green,” Birch mumbled. “Don’t go green. Don’t go g—”

Repeating himself was a new nervous tic.

The blue lights switched off, stalling just long enough to torment us with the possibility of success. I held my breath, afraid that if I let it go, my wish for safety might escape. Mine was still a child’s hope, and I was too old to believe.

The sky flashed green beneath an expanding canopy of colored light that sought out the edges of the Mile and marked them. The high-pitched metallic whine of spinning canisters dropped in tone to a steady, foreboding horn blast.

“It wasn’t enough.” Birch was still watching the sky.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

“Get back to the house!” That was Winnie.

None of us needed the nudge. We were already moving.

“I’ll get Birdie,” Anise said. “Be ready to go when I get there.”

Running was definitely not a game for me. The movement of my arms and legs was too closely tied to survival; my mind surrendered all of its emotional space to tactical analysis. I was already mapping out where my friends and family were in relation to my position, checking right and left from the corner of each eye to make sure no one hostile was getting close, completely tangled in strings of adrenaline and endorphins offered up by my body to help me push through the fatigue and pain that always came with a quick getaway.

This was not fun at all. With a lame arm, every stride felt off-balance. It made Jermay hold back, when he could have outrun us all. He was too concerned with me to worry about himself.

“What’s the matter with your arm?” Birch asked. By this point, we’d all mastered the art of conversation while fleeing.

“I got a shock when I opened the power module,” I said.

“Do you want me to sling it?”

“No time!”

Birch meant well, but sometimes he acted like we were still on the Center. Danger was background noise he’d learned to tune out years ago. It was something he could avoid by only going certain places or saying certain things. A “stay out of the water, and the crocodiles can’t eat you” philosophy. He wasn’t prepared for the water to jump the banks and wash us straight into the crocs’ mouths.

Winnie hit her grandfather’s door first, and we plunged into a sparkling cloud of cinnamon-scented smoke on the other side. Anise had already found Birdie, and Dev had teleported them home via a shortcut through time and space.

“The module’s charging,” Nola told the kids. “Three minutes and we’re gone, so if you want it and you can carry it, get it down here in two. That’s all you’re taking with you.”

“Easy for me,” Wren said with a shrug. “I don’t got nothin’ that’s mine except my skin.”

He went to help Dev, while Winnie and Nola went in search of their grandfather.

The feeling in my arm was returning one protesting nerve at a time, causing my hand to jerk at random intervals. I tried holding it still with my other hand, but the spasms were too strong. I wished my father was there to tell me what was happening. Surely he’d had a machine or two backwash on him. He’d know how to fix it.

“Klok!” Anise yelled up the stairs, then toward the kitchen.

He ambled in from outside.

“Has something affected the visible spectrum in relation to the curvature of the Earth?”
rat-tatted across his screen.
“I have run a diagnostic. My eyes are functioning properly, yet the sky appears green.”

“It
is
green,” I said.

“That is disconcerting. Green is unnatural. Are you the cause? I was unaware that you possessed this skill. You should attempt to correct the angle of curvature.”

“No!”

Klok didn’t display emotion in the words he spoke, mostly because they were typed across a screen. He didn’t have real body language to clue a person in on the tone of what he was saying, so it was easy to take things personally when he was stating what he believed to be facts. I heard him blaming me for the green skies, and I heard the words
disconcerting
and
unnatural
.

“This is not my fault!” I snapped at him. “The Commission spiked us.”

“Apologies. I made an assumption based on known variables. Your powers are in flux, and you have demonstrated accidental destructive capability in the past. Your arm is weird. Do you realize that it’s twitching? This would imply nerve damage. Was that an inappropriate observation as well?”

I’d never heard him babble before.

“Klok, are you actually
nervous
?”

“Evacuation will improve my mood. Statistically, a spike precedes increased Commission presence in 98% of occurrences, with an error margin of 2%. I do not wish to return to a Commission-run facility.”

He was scared of being taken apart, even with his armor.

“No one’s going to the Commission,” Anise told him. “Round up the golems. I don’t care what mood Xerxes is in, get him to cooperate, even if you have to solder his feet together.”

“That would significantly impede his ability to function,”
Klok said. Sarcasm was just not part of his programming.

The first, sluggish tones of a last-century air-raid siren sounded. Distant, then closer as the machine warmed up, the tone slipped in under the windows and through the doors. It shook the walls as Winnie and Nola reappeared, each supporting Baba by an arm.

“They’ve crossed the buoys,” Baba said. “They’ll be here any minute. Girls, kids, get into the pod. It should be preset for the beta site.”

“The pod that brought you here?” Anise asked. “It’s still functional?”

“Most of them are. Your father was always prepared for the worst. He made it possible for us to rebuild at a beta site if we were ever found.”

“We can take you with us,” Nola offered. “There’s room.”

“It’s safer if we split,” Anise said tactfully. “Our golems got us here. They won’t fail us now.”

She knew the Mile was collateral damage, not the main target. That was us. Once we were airborne, the Commission would likely shift their focus, giving the people on the Mile a better chance.

“Penn, if that arm’s a problem, tell me now. We’re going to need you out there.”

“Flame!” I called out in response. I never got a heads-up before my touch failed, and I never felt any different. I wasn’t sure if my phoenix would answer until the spark went off inside me like I’d flicked a lighter. The only available heat source in the room was the barely there candle Winnie had lit for her brother. It surrendered the last of Greyor’s memory, splitting the peak into wings, stretching out into tail feathers. Flame appeared pure and perfect, now bolstered by Greyor’s soul as well as Evie’s.

“Good,” Anise said.

“What about you?” Nola asked Winnie. A new sadness settled in her eyes when she realized whose photo the candle had been burning for. She kept quiet, wisely choosing not to burden her grandfather with the loss before their escape. She went to the shelf and retrieved the frame.

Winnie stood between us, the picture of indecision. Her family was offering to take her back and welcome her into the new life they’d all be facing. Her second family was poised to run away to draw danger away from the first.

Birch stepped over and took her hand.

“She’s coming with us.”

“Or you could go with them,” I said to him. Maybe
that
was his answer. Become one of the unseen and uncounted. Get away from me and the constant reminders of the Center that came with me.

“I can?” The suggestion stunned him.

He’d only made a handful of decisions in his life, and he’d never considered that he could pick his own path based on his own desires.

“What do you want to do?” he asked Winnie. “I’ll go with you.”

It would have made for a nearly romantic gesture if not for the intrusion of a Commission cargo hauler sailing past the house. Deceptively fast for their size and cumbersome shape, these transport ships were built to ferry supplies and equipment. They could also move several hundred people—personnel or captives—and now I saw there were three of them. The Commission either intended to land shock troops on the Mile, or fill a detention center with its citizens.

“Whatever we’re doing, let’s do it now,” Jermay said.

I spun toward the stairs.

“You all get in place. Give me one minute.”

“Penn!”

“One minute!”

All I could think was
this time
I wouldn’t let them take my father’s work. They’d burned the train and demolished the Hollow, blotting nearly every trace of Magnus Roma off the planet. The only thing left was what he’d kept hidden here on the Mile, and it was going
with me
, no matter how I got off this mile-wide tin can. I took the stairs two at a time, ignoring Anise’s shouts for me to stay with the group.