City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World) (33 page)

“What? Why not?” I probably should have aimed for a more casual tone, but she’d startled me.

“Because I decommissioned that lab. There’s nothing she can do.”

I looked back up at the satellite lab. I couldn’t stop myself. Horror dulled my thinking. This time, Seana saw it. She looked at the screen, back to me, her eyes narrow.
 

She’d been a brilliant woman. She’d fought her way to a director’s position in the second largest Jansynian corporation in the world. And she’d known me well, both before and after. “They’re here,” she said.

The other two stared up at the screen. “Syed.” Amelia’s fists clenched. “He’s here.”

Unconcerned, Seana tapped several commands into her computer. “The two of you can handle him. I’ve sent two full security teams down to help with the rest.”

“What about him?” Terrel waved his hand at me. “He lied.
Again
.”

“To protect his friends. Who among us can fault loyalty? Especially when it won’t matter in just a few more minutes.”

I tried to think, tried to whip out some clever thought. Some way to warn Spark, some way to distract Seana, some way to delay the inevitable. But I couldn’t move past Seana’s casual declaration that we’d already lost. “What did you do?”

“Go take care of this,” she said to Amelia and Terrel. “I’ll be fine.”

They left us alone together. Seana still had her eyes on the screen. “A pity we can’t see what’s actually happening down there. I don’t suppose you’d disrupt Syed’s illusion if I asked nicely. I know you’re capable of it.”

I wanted to see, too, but it would give her more of an advantage than it gave me. “I’m surprised you haven’t raised the alarm.”

Her lips pressed into a thin smile. “What, and warn your friends we know they’re there? What good would that do?”
 

I had to trust Iris, that she and Vogg could hold things together, that they were watching for danger. I had to do what I came here to do, and do it quickly. But I couldn’t look anxious, couldn’t let Seana see I was in any hurry. I couldn’t let her start to wonder, start to worry. I had to keep her relaxed and convinced she was in charge.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

I tried to relax once more in the chair, as comfortable as I could get with my hands behind my back. “For not understanding. For running away.”

She gave up on the screen, which still showed no activity, and faced me once more. “You would never have given us Spark.”

“No. But as you just said, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

Her gray eyes softened and her lips quirked. Not quite a smile, but the look was so
Seana
it made me ache. “We were in a delicate position. I couldn’t cut off the project. It wasn’t in Seana’s jurisdiction, for one thing. And it would have raised too many questions. And once I became Seana—once I wasn’t Eddis anymore—I couldn’t remember enough to be able to sabotage it again like I had before.
 

“Believe it or not, you helped me when you got the Fyean away from us. You broke the lift, injured a few guards. I was able to convince my superiors the situation in Miroc was too unstable and that the project should be moved. Several other Desavris locations are fighting for the project right now. It will be months before it’s back up and running.”

“Plenty of time for you to figure out how to break it again.”
 

“Terrel will go with it, wherever it ends up. It will become his problem.” Seana stood and came around her desk. She reached down and cupped her fingers under my chin. “I like being Seana. She has a sense of purpose. You can’t imagine what it was like for us, what we lost when our father stopped speaking to us. It feels good to be her, to feel her confidence, her conviction.”

Her hand moved up to stroke my cheek. I closed my eyes and thought of Seana, the real Seana. I had to remember her, focus on her, and not on the creature wearing her skin. If this was to work…

Her voice was soft, intimate, close. “You were her greatest regret, that she had to give you up. And I understand, I do. You shine with that same conviction. And it’s selfish of me—it would have been selfish of her—but I want you here. I want you with me. The others, they hate you and fear you because you know the truth about us. They can’t see that that’s precisely why I need you.”

A rustling sound and her hands were on my legs. I opened my eyes to see her on her knees, face-to-face with me. “I’ve been alive—half alive—for so long. No thoughts of my own, no needs, no wants. Only obedience and secrecy, and one life after another that wasn’t mine. But I want a life. I want to feel and be and know, and I want someone at my side who understands the whole of me.”

She leaned forward until her lips were a breath away from mine. “Who loves the whole of me,” she whispered.

The shadow had it all down, the voice, the look, the way Seana moved. But the words were all wrong. Every one of them. Seana would never have compromised her ideals, her people, not for anything. Not for love. Not for me. It was the truth that had come between us. And now it was the truth that helped me do what I had to do, despite the face of the woman I loved pleading for me to stay.

I closed the distance between us, pressed my lips to hers. I kissed as though it were a promise. I didn’t trust myself to speak the lie. Kaifail was a convincing liar. I wasn’t sure I could be. Not about this.

I counted to ten in my head, then pulled back, forged my best smile. “This would be easier if my hands were free. I swear I’m not carrying any weapons.”

She breathed a soft laugh. “Even if you were, it’s not as if you know how to use them.” She reached around behind me, touched some hidden latch, and the restraints fell away.

I lifted my hand to her cheek, ran a finger over her smooth skin. So many times I’d done this before. Nights together, Seana and I. I remembered the way she’d lean in to me, the way her eyes would not quite close. The soft sigh as she’d relax—truly relax—and for just a little while focus on us instead of her omnipresent employer.

Seana and I. I locked the images in my head as I leaned in for another kiss. I slipped one arm around her, pulling her close. The other hand behind her head, holding her against me. Seana and I. Memory and emotion. The truth of us. Our hearts, our souls.
 

The magic I’d used to save myself from the shadow, the power-fueled determination to stay me. I focused that power on her, my mind and heart full of my sense of us, of her, of the Seana I knew rather than this broken copy in my arms.
 

She felt the magic as soon as I released it. She tried to pull away, but I held her tight. She struggled against me, bit at my lip where I held her in the kiss. I fed the power through us. Everything I knew that was Seana—the real Seana. It burned through her, refining, purifying.

Seana and I. The hope I hadn’t dared voice. Syed’s claim that their hosts didn’t die when the shadow invaded, but only when it left. If I could hold on to Seana, if the magic could hold her, re-create her, burn her clean the way it had me—

If I could save her.

The shadow fought back. It tried to move into me, like ice against my skin, my hands, my lips, but I held my sense of self as solid in my head as I did my sense of her. I soaked in the magic, let it define me and re-create me the same as I was doing to her.

“Ash, please! Don’t. I can’t. I’ll do anything.”

Seana would never have begged. I flared the power one more time, felt it race through me, through her.
 

She moaned, struggled. In my heightened awareness, I knew the shadow, felt its separate presence inside, felt it trying to flee.
 

My power was a cage. Seana, the shadow, and I. I held it inside her as the magic burned it from the inside. Her hands clenched on my arms. My power flared through the both of us. Seana and I. Only Seana and I. I opened my eyes, saw the clear gray of hers. “Ash!”

The shadow was gone.

And Seana was…

She gave one last gasp, and went limp in my arms.
 

Lifeless.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Shock

I eased Seana’s body onto the floor. I was numb from the effort, from the sadness, from the shock.
 

I hadn’t saved her. Hadn’t even bought myself the time to make a proper goodbye.
 

One shadow gone, but two more were still out there, hunting my friends. I had no time to mourn.

Seana’s desk. Seana’s computer. I poked at the touch-screen, searching for some kind of familiar directory. I’d watched her do this; I just had to remember. For the first time in days, I found it a blessing rather than a curse that all the technology I was used to had first been Jansynian designs.
 

Too long. This was taking way too long. Where were the other two shadows? Had they reached the lab already? Were Iris and Spark and Vogg already…

There
. The screen switched over to the view of the lab. The still-empty view of the lab. Which told me Syed, at least, was still in the game.
 

Volume controls at the bottom of the screen, both muted. I moved both sliders up, hoping I was right and this was the intercom. “Hello? Iris? Anyone?”

“Ash!” Iris’s yelling voice and the sound of gunshots. Surreal and disconnected from the video feed showing a still-empty lab. “Where are you?”

“Seana’s office. She’s been…I’m alone.”

“Nothing works! Nothing’s hooked up. There’s no way for Spark to get into the system. You need to get down here. We need to—”

“No.” Spark’s voice. “Wait. You may be able to…hold on.”

More gunfire. A crash. “Iris? Spark? What’s happening? I can’t see.”

The video feed flashed, and Syed’s veil dropped away. I took in the situation as fast as I could.

Piles of chairs, tables, cabinets, and even computers blocked the three doorways leading into the main room. One of those doorways held a solid metal door that looked to be holding, but the other two entrances had windows built into the doors. Windows that had been smashed out and had Jansynian security shooting through them.

Vogg crouched behind a desk in the central work area, returning fire. A wall divided the central space, and Syed and Iris were behind that wall, standing up on tables so they could also shoot back. Both of them had obtained Jansynian weapons.
 

Spark poked her head out from one of the side offices where she was huddled on the floor. She looked up at the camera through which I was seeing the room. That must have been where my voice came from. “You need to reconnect us!”

“How?” I winced as an explosive projectile blew a hole in the wall of the desk Vogg was using for cover. He swore and squeezed off three quick shots in the direction it had come from.
 

Spark dragged her bag out from the office and fished out her NetPad. She lay on the floor, typing furiously into it. I waited, powerless, separated from the action once again.
 

Vogg’s ears were flat against his head, a determined grimace on his face. Iris was still Jansynian, but her hair had gone wild, with ends of angry red. Only Syed still seemed calm, taking one careful shot after another. “Have you seen the other shadows yet?”

“Not yet,” Iris answered, ducking a sudden shower of chips from the damaged ceiling.
 

“Only two left to deal with,” Syed said.

“How did you know?”

Another explosive hit the wall directly behind Syed. He didn’t flinch. “I felt her die.”

Streaks of red spread up Iris’s hair. “Can you feel the other two? Do you know where they are?”

“No,” he answered. Then, after a pause: “But they will come to us. Never doubt it.”

“I’ve got it!” Spark cried, excited. “Ash, if you can get me into the system, I should still be able to make this work.”

I pulled in closer to Seana’s computer. “How do I do that?”

“It’s just security. I need the right permissions is all.” She was still typing away without looking up.

Not that she had a camera into this office, so she couldn’t see me staring helplessly at the screen. “You’re going to have to talk me through this. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Quickly,” Vogg said through clenched teeth.
 

#

It wasn’t quick. Neither Spark nor I knew the system well enough for her to be able to talk me straight through it. I opened folders and ran programs and sifted through layers I didn’t even know existed, reading screen after screen out loud as Spark shook her head to all of them. While the firefight continued.

Vogg took a shot to the head. It knocked him back, shattered one of his horns. He crawled back to his feet, slower, but still moving. Still shooting.

Syed got shot as well. A bullet tore through his shoulder. He didn’t seem to notice.

“There, that’s it!”
 

My hand froze over the blinking line of text I’d just read. “That’s what?”

Spark looked up towards the camera. “That’s me. That’s my signal. You should be able to just tap me and give me access.”

I did as she said, tapped the line of text and was given a menu of security options that seemed to be in ascending order of access. I picked the very top one. “Are you in?”

“I’m in.” Her attention was back on her work. “Now I just need to…you’ve done all you can, Ash.”

“Could use another hand down here,” Iris added impatiently.

“I’m on my way.”

I shut down the computer. No reason to make it any easier for anyone who came in after me to see what we were doing. I paused at Seana’s body, hesitating too long before I took her gun. Guilt twisted my stomach—guilt for everything—but there simply wasn’t time to let it slow me down.

Spark had talked me through the route from Seana’s office to the lab before we split up. I didn’t run. That would have drawn all the wrong kinds of attention. I did walk as fast as I possibly could.

No more security got in my way. I heard no alarms. Saw no signs of trouble. Seana had wanted to keep this quiet, and now Spark was inside the system, making it work for us. I moved fast as I dared through the empty halls, preparing myself for the inevitable confrontation.