City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World) (31 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Watching through the Glass

I saw what was coming. And I had no idea how to stop it.
 

Through the video screen, I couldn’t search the man’s eyes for signs of possession, but I could imagine the scenario if he was, and that scenario was pretty much playing out in front of me. He yelled, pumping his fist in the air, driving the crowd around him into a frenzy. Molly was back on the line with the guards, ordering them to hold their positions, to ready their weapons. And, gods help us, to fire upon anyone who got too close.

To anyone who didn’t know, he probably looked brave. This man, this firebrand who took the lead. He seemed to have no fear of death, and why should he when he was already dead? But Iris and I were the only ones who knew that.

I watched, paralyzed, as he ran forward. We had no sound from the video feeds, couldn’t hear the gunshot, but I saw his body jerk and fall.
 

The crowd went mad. They surged forward in a suicidal madness. The guards in front of the barriers fell back as the guards on the wall opened fire.

It would have been enough. Amelia knew her business. The security teams knew their business. They had the arms and the position to turn back even this crowd. Hundreds were about to die, but they weren’t going to break the reservoir’s defenses.

Except for the shadows.

I saw it move. For the first time since my original vision of Eddis’s death, I saw one move outside the flesh. Darkness incarnate, flowing out from the fallen body of the dead instigator. In the crowd, in the chaos, I would have missed it if I hadn’t been watching for it.

“Iris—” was all I had time to say as the shadow flicked across the open space and up the wall and flowed into the body of an unsuspecting guard. How did no one see that? How could no one—

The newly possessed guard lifted his gun away from the crowd and turned it on the man beside him. Four members of the security team fell in succession. Molly’s volume escalated as she demanded an explanation of what was happening. Iris and I stood silent, watching. We knew.

“We need to get out there.” Iris said, her calm voice a surreal counterpoint to Molly’s yelling. “We’re the only ones who can stop it.”

I knew she was right. I tried to nod, to agree with her, but my body felt like stone. Impossible to breathe, much less move or speak. Trapped in my own nightmare, where once again I was a helpless witness to a horror I couldn’t fix.

Amelia’s people were the best, but no one could have prepared them for this. For their own people turning against them with no logic or warning. The first possessed guard was shot down, but his executioner was the next to be taken, the next to turn against her own people. The shadow-created chaos was enough to give the protesters a chance to make the gate. Giants reached up, grabbed guards off the wall, and pulled them down into the rabid crowd. Weapons changed hands. Now the shooting came from both sides and I’d lost track of the shadow.

“Ash!” Iris said, sharper. She grabbed my arm and dragged me to the door.

The open ground around the security building had become a warzone. Except I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t hear it.

I stood on a balcony at Kaifail’s temple, looking out on the chanting crowd. Demanding we come out, demanding we let them in, demanding we bring back the rain, demanding we bring back the gods.

I lay in a hospital bed, immobile from the bandages and the drugs and the pain that the first two couldn’t stop, smelling smoke as the city burned.

I ran through a dark alley. Never fast enough. Never far enough. Felt hands catch me. Felt the first blow of a wooden board against the side of my face. Felt the first burning lash of a knife in my side.

“Ash!” Those hands on my shoulder. I struggled, fought back, the terror a bitter taste in my mouth.

“Ash!”

My ribs cracked. Kick after kick in my sides. Coughing blood. I couldn’t breathe.
 

“God-dammit, Ash!” Shaking me. “I need you with me.”

Iris’s voice was my lifeline. I clung to it, an anchor against the waking nightmares trying to smother me.
 

Gunshots and screams. Real or imagined? Happening now or echoes of before? “Iris,” I gasped against the weight on my chest.

“Faster, Ash,” she snapped. “No time right now for you to flip out.”

Iris, the irritation in her voice a thin mask over her own fear. That was real. That was now.
 

I closed my eyes, forced air through my lungs, focused on Iris, on her voice, her presence, her reality. I willed, I prayed that when I opened my eyes again the world would be real again.

For good or ill, it was. Iris had pulled us back against the security building, out of the worst of the fight that surrounded us. “I’m here,” I tried to say, but I couldn’t make any noise.

Iris nodded at the shape my lips made, searched my face. “Hold it together just a little longer. Then we’ll go have a breakdown together.”

“Right.” My throat croaked around the word, but at least the sound came out. “Where is it?”

“How should I know? You’re the one who can see it.”

The calm I needed for magic was out of the question at this moment. I scanned around us, the pockets of fighting. A lizard bleeding from the shoulder wrestling with one of the guards for his gun. A giant carrying a rifle that looked like a toy in her hands, swinging it around her like a bludgeon. Three human civilians with a guard on the ground before them, kicking her over and over—

My throat threatened to close again and I jerked back against the wall. “Everything’s falling apart. They don’t care about any of these people. He’s done what he came to do.”

“No he hasn’t.” Iris shifted with the speed of breath. In one liquid motion, a bear lunged in front of me to deflect two rushing men carrying broken pieces from the gate barriers. She knocked them aside, then melted back into herself. “Come on.”

I got it. Slower than Iris, but I understood. These people—these desperate people—they wanted in. They wanted the water, and they’d take it. But not all of it. There was still enough water in the reservoir, they couldn’t take all of it. This mob, once they’d won their way through, would reduce the water supply, but they wouldn’t destroy it. The shadows wanted it destroyed.

Iris dove into the fray, towards the tunnel that led into the heart of the dam. She needed me to follow. She wouldn’t be able to see the monster until it was crawling its way inside her.
 

The first step forward, away from the wall, into the madness, was the hardest thing I ever had to do.
 

I made that step. Then another. Then another. And I was running after her.

#

Iris had studied the security plans, so I hoped that meant she knew where she was going. I followed her through the red-lit maintenance-ways, up narrow staircases, higher and higher. We weren’t the first to make it into the tunnels; the floors were wet with blood and littered with bodies. Some shot, some bludgeoned to death, and a few with no visible wounds. From the shadow we hunted? If so, we were on the right track, but with no idea how far we were behind.

Voices, shouts, screams echoed around us. In a better life, this would have been a nightmare, but my bar for terrifying had been pushed pretty high these last few days and after making it through the fight outside in the courtyard, my mind seemed to have settled into a middle-gear, adrenaline-smoothed dread.

At the top of a metal staircase, Iris banged open a heavy metal door that led us back outside. We both raced onto the starlit walkway at the top of the dam. Far below, I could see the struggle continuing in the street and courtyard.
 

Up here, we were not alone.

A woman in a tattered robe stood about a hundred feet away, in the control booth that looked out over the much-diminished lake of the reservoir. Through the glass, I could see her frowning at the panel of flashing lights before her. As the door closed behind us with a loud
ca-thunk
, she looked up at Iris and me and smiled.

Oh how I knew that smile. “It’s the shadow.”

“Give me your gun.”
 

I passed the gun to Iris as the shadow-possessed woman started pressing buttons and turning dials. It was obvious she didn’t know what she was doing, but the longer she stayed in there the more likely she was to cause problems.

Iris fired a shot at the window. It cracked, but didn’t shatter. The shadow-woman laughed. “You’ll have to come and get me,” she singsonged without looking up, safe behind the bullet-proof glass.

No. Not this time. I pushed my hand forward, the gesture a focus as I willed the cracks to grow, to spread, to separate. Energy into the fractures begun by Iris’s bullet.
 

The glass exploded inward, turning the shadow’s laugh into a shriek. Then five more deafening shots as Iris emptied the gun.

The woman slumped forward, her head and shoulders a pulpy mess. I watched the inky darkness float up and braced myself. I’d fought this creature off in the warehouse. I could do it again.

Except it didn’t advance on us. It zipped away into the greater darkness of the night. “It’s running away.” I grabbed Iris’s arm, relief so intense it made my hand shake. “We did it. We saved—”

An alarm sounded all around us, an echoing klaxon from speakers both here and at the dam’s base. The people far below stopped their fighting, staring up. Iris ran for the booth as I stared down, over the reservoir side of the damn.

The shadow ran because it had accomplished its goal. The release gates were opening. As I leaned over the railing, a sound floated up that I hadn’t heard for months. A sound I hadn’t been sure I would ever in my life hear again.

The sound of rushing water.

#

Iris couldn’t stop it. We didn’t know how the controls worked any more than the shadow had. And luck was not on our side.

As the gates opened, the water filled the channels that led down from the reservoir and out around the edge of the city, into the desert. Designed to relieve pressure if the water got too high, the canals weren’t designed to carry the full rushing weight of water from fully opened gates. First a stream, then a flood, the water filled the little canals, then flooded over the side, splashing into the courtyard, the street, and the thirsty thirsty ground.

The uncontrolled deluge of water stopped everything happening below. Greeted first by cheers, then by horrified shouts as they realized all the water was running away, soaking into the sand. All the water, Miroc’s last hope, would be gone—irretrievably gone—in minutes.
 

I knew enough—I’d seen enough to realize what that meant. Miroc’s lifespan from here would be measured in hours. Fires, riots, fights—the city would tear itself apart before the sun could rise and desiccate what was left. We had one chance and one chance alone—one last shot at averting the end of the world.

“Fly back to the temple,” I yelled at Iris. “You’ll be able to get across the city faster than I can. Get Spark and Vogg and Syed. Meet me at the Web. At our entry point into the Crescent.”

“What if they aren’t ready?” she shouted back.

I didn’t answer. She knew we’d run out of time as well as I did. She hesitated only a moment longer, then ran and jumped off the edge of the damn, changing into a falcon as she hit the air. I went to the booth to retrieve the gun she’d left. We were going to need it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Breaking In

Kaifail was an asshole.

He was a liar and a cheat. He stacked the deck against people and then punished them when they failed to live up to his expectations. He was manipulative. He was uncaring.

And he was gone.

I thought I’d already faced the end of the world. With the Abandon, with the deaths of the Favored Children, when the people turned against the priesthoods, when they rioted, when they tore down everything and everyone I had known.
 

But if these last few days had taught me anything, it was that there was always more to lose. Always more people trying to take those things away.

I’d let so much be taken. I’d run, I’d hidden, I’d compromised, hoping at some point the universe would be sated, that I would wake up one morning to a world that said
I’ve taken enough
and then left me alone. That it would all just go away.

Stupid. Because this was what it looked like when the world went away. It was all going—really going. My friends, my city, and the people within it.
 

I’d been so angry at those people, sitting around and waiting for the gods to save them, but how had I been any better? I wasn’t hoping for rescue, just indifference. Hoping the bad things would stop if I lay low enough and quiet enough and didn’t ever think about it too much.

I’d conceded the game before I understood the stakes. Now all I could do was keep fighting forward and pray it wasn’t too late.

I ghosted my way around the outer edge of Miroc, sacrificing a direct path for one that would keep me out of habited neighborhoods and the eruptions I could hear already happening. The city smelled of smoke and dust. The skyline sparkled with flickering embers.
This
was the end of the world, and if I couldn’t stop it, I was going to get to stand and watch it happen.
 

“This can’t be how it ends,” I whispered to the empty night and any gods who might still be listening.
 

The others made it to the Web before me. Iris met me at the base, dropping out of the sky and shifting in midair to land light on her feet. “They’re waiting above.”

I felt like I should say something, that the moment required…something. “Iris, I—”

“Come
on
, Ash.” She shot back up into the air.
 

I climbed.

#

Spark already had the access panel open, and Vogg was halfway inside as I inched my way along the thick support girder that got us up here. “I see the maintenance door,” he said, pulling himself out. His wide, plated shoulders barely fit through the opening, but the rest of us would have no trouble.