The Last City (31 page)

Copernicus hurdled over them and smashed through the door into the prison area. He paused. Thousands of Androts – men, women and children – packed the prison cells with standing room only. They gripped the bars and stared at him with fear. He nodded to Diega. She ran to the control panel beside the door and fried the central locking system. All of the barred doors slid open and the Androts poured out. Over the top of the surging masses Copernicus spotted the shimmer of red lights. Jude stepped into sight at the other end of the corridor, with SevenM riding his shoulder. The soldier moved unsteadily, gripping the bars to support himself.

Copernicus cut through the crowd with Diega and Silho right behind him. When he was within reach, he grasped Jude’s metal arm and the Ar Antarian jolted. His silver skin was a sickly pale grey and he had a deep cut in his neck, spilling white Androt blood all over his clothes. The wound revealed a faint half-caste Androt barcode reading 939994, which had been hidden by fake skin. The numbers immediately brought to Copernicus’ mind the barcode of the Androt Kry, who had been missing from Fortitude Hill. It was 939993. This coding match meant Kry and Jude were half-brothers.

Copernicus felt a ripple of surprise. He’d known from his interrogation of the Vice-Standard that Jude was a half-breed of some kind, and had suspected, since they’d discovered the white blood in Moris-Isles, that he was part Androt. Now he knew for sure why the Vice-Standard had tried to kill Jude. He and the rest of the king’s people would never have allowed a machine-breed to take the throne. And it didn’t feel coincidental that Jude and Kry were related and that the witches had targeted both of them. It suggested to Copernicus that the Skreaf needed someone from their bloodline, but for what purpose?

Diega hugged onto Jude and Shawe crashed into both of them. He grabbed the injured soldier by the front of his shirt and shouted over the noise of the alarms and escaping Androts, ‘Where’s my brother?’

Jude just stared at him, his electric blue eyes glowing in the muted light.

Raine appeared in the wall just ahead of them and hissed, ‘They’re coming. She’s here – Bellum.’

As she spoke the words, Copernicus felt the awful prickling sensation of the High Skreaf’s presence. Diega snarled and Shawe armed his electrifier. Both of them turned to face the door where they’d entered.

‘No time!’ Copernicus said, shoving them all towards the back of the prison area. Jude stumbled and Diega grabbed his arm to support him.

They found a door and joined the stream of escapees running through the back corridors towards the building’s exit. They soon hit an assemblage of guards blocking their path. The guards opened fire and Androt civilians fell screaming all around them. Shawe ran out in front of the team, electricity glancing off his skin. Diega morphed everything she could see into weapons, which Raine, using Cos magics, turned into projectiles. Those guards who managed to dodge the missiles Silho hit hand to hand. She drew from their body-lights and smashed them backwards. Copernicus ran upside-down along the ceiling, gunning down whoever was left standing. The guards tried to target him, but were disorientated by his position. A shot struck him at waist level, snapping the locking gauge of his weapon belt. It crashed to the ground, but he didn’t stop to retrieve it. They finally hit the exit door and burst out of the building.

The fury of the storm had broken over the city. Booms of thunder trembled the ground and explosions of electricity struck rooftops and transflyers in mid-flight, obliterating whatever they touched. A brutal wind drove rain into their faces and gigantic hailstones dropped like ice bombs from the sky. Through the confusion of running people, Copernicus spotted the hole where they had entered. Diega staggered under Jude’s weight. Copernicus grabbed the Ar Antarian’s other arm and the two of them dragged him towards the fence and through the hole. Shawe and Silho ran right behind them, but before they could pass through, the fence’s backup security kicked in, replacing the cut-out section with a virtual fence that would carve them into pieces if they tried to jump through.

‘Keep going, we’ll find another way!’ Shawe yelled. He took off with Silho in the opposite direction.

Copernicus cursed, but they had to keep running as electricity zapped all around them and the spotlight of the guard tower swung their way. He and Diega fled with Jude across the stretch towards the perimeter fence. They crashed through where they had entered and didn’t stop. It was unsafe for Diega to launch the transflyer until they were clear of the guard tower’s gun range.

They ran through the backstreets, taking corner after corner until one turn brought them to a sudden stop. Two cloaked Skreaf witches stood blocking their path. Diega reeled back and she and Jude toppled onto the road. Copernicus instinctively grabbed at his weapon belt, but it was gone. He snatched the knife he’d hidden in his arm and slashed at the witches while they were still forming their curses. They both fell. One was hurt but started to regenerate straightaway, the other he’d mortally injured. The demon ripped out of the dead host body and discarded the skin like a wet coat.

Copernicus didn’t pause to a have a good look at the sinewy demon dripping mucus and blood. He grabbed Jude and Diega and hauled them at a sprint up the side of a nearby building all the way to the roof.

‘Diega, launch now!’ he yelled over the scream of the storm. The rain had turned to acid and bit at their faces. The Fen dragged the silver coin out of her pocket and morphed it back into its original transflyer form. In a sudden rush of movement, Jude grabbed Copernicus’ blade from the commander’s hand. He backed away from them and held it up to his own neck.

‘It’s my blood they need. It’s my blood . . . I can’t let them get it. This is the only way. I’m sorry,’ he said, the tip of the knife drilling into his flesh.

Copernicus detected the vibration of the demons climbing up the side of the building after them. With no time to reason, he struck out and grabbed Jude’s arm. He spun the Ar Antarian around and pinned his arms behind his back. Diega snapped restraints around his metal wrists. Copernicus dragged open the transflyer door and threw Jude onto the backseat. SevenM scuttled in with him and Copernicus slammed the door shut. In a momentary pause of storm sound, he heard a scream echoing into the night. He recognised the voice.

‘It’s Shawe,’ he said to Diega. ‘I have to find Brabel. Go back to the hide. We’ll meet you there. Don’t release Jude until I’m back.’

Diega panted, dripping wet, her skin a pale grey.

‘Go!’ He pushed her.

She scrambled into the flyer and took off, dodging blasts of electricity from the sky. Copernicus ran across the building and leapt from that rooftop onto the next. He headed towards the screams, sensing the net of a trap closing in all around him.

E
li stumbled out of the Murk and into a room at the Scorpia State Hospital. He tripped on a bed leg and fell flat on his face on the cold floor. Ev’r’s boots thudded down beside his head and she dragged him up.

‘You have serious problems, don’t you?’ she said unhelpfully.

‘Yes, and I’m not alone.’

A shadow appeared at the frosted glass panel in the door and they both dropped behind the bed. The door handle rattled and the hinges creaked open. Eli peeped around the metal bedframe and saw two uniformed guardians standing in the doorway. Their faces were vaguely familiar, as though he might have seen them in the corridors once or twice. They scanned the room, waited there a moment then backed out, closing the door behind them. Eli sighed in relief. The sheets near his nose smelt of bleach and were coarse to the touch. Machines peeped and bleeped above them, the robotic monitoring systems positioned in a circle around the bed like concerned relatives.

Eli stood up and gazed at the survivor of the Galleria attack. He felt a jolt of surprise to see a young Androt man lying still, his eyes restfully closed. A black stain, identical to the darkness on the dead Galleys’ faces, spread over the pale skin of the Androt’s cheek and down to his neck, smudging the tips of his barcode numbers – 939963. Newly formed grey scars covered his chest and arms. A more serious wound on his shoulder was still healing, tendons, muscles, flesh and skin re-knitting as they watched.

‘He was the only one of thirteen victims to survive,’ Eli whispered.

‘Not surprising,’ Ev’r said. ‘He’s a machine-breed. They have a high resistance to magics.’

‘I didn’t know that.’ Eli watched the slow rise and fall of the man’s chest.

‘Not many people do,’ Ev’r said. ‘See that mark?’ She traced the black on the man’s face. ‘That’s a death-curse. He was hit close, too. These other marks are torture scars.’

‘How do you know?’ Eli asked.

She glanced at him then lifted up the front of her shirt. The same type of thin straight scars crisscrossed her stomach and sides to her back. ‘You learn dark magics through what witches call
corporal application
.’ She dropped her shirt. ‘Basically they torture you until you pick up enough to fight back. They must have needed information from this guy – otherwise they wouldn’t have wasted the energy.’

Ev’r’s eyes darted to the door as more shadows appeared and passed. ‘We may as well go,’ she said. ‘He’s fried.’

Eli touched a hand to the man’s arm, the skin cold beneath his fingertips. ‘Keep well,’ he said.

The Androt’s eyelids flipped open. He stared at them, terrified. ‘Please don’t leave me,’ he whispered. ‘The witches are here. They’re just outside the door.’

Eli helped the Androt man, Lao, sit up in the bed.

‘I’ve been too scared to show anyone I’m conscious,’ Lao said. ‘The soldiers guarding me are some of the witches who attacked the Galleria.’

‘How do you know if you haven’t opened your eyes?’ Ev’r asked.

‘Beak6.’ He pointed to the little parrot robot sitting on the side table. She appeared to be deactivated, but when he named her, she blinked and red lights fired up behind her eyes. The lights reminded Eli of SevenM. ‘I can see with her eyes.’

‘What happened at the Galleria?’ Ev’r asked.

The man gulped. He shivered as he remembered. ‘They came in. They . . . they were asking me things . . .’

‘What were they asking you?’

The Androt bit his lip.

‘Do you want our help or not?’ Ev’r demanded.

‘They wanted information about someone.’

‘Who?’ Ev’r asked.

‘I can’t say.’

‘Let’s go,’ Ev’r said to Eli. ‘We’re wasting our time.’

‘Wait!’ Lao said. ‘They wanted to know about Kry.’

‘Kry,’ Eli repeated, his nerves jumping. ‘Kry – who works at Fortitude Hill?’

‘Yes,’ Lao whispered. ‘Did they find him? I didn’t give them anything. I swear I didn’t. Is he . . . okay?’

‘We don’t know. We never found a body, and the military is now reporting him as a threat.’

‘Then I have to find him. I have to warn him,’ Lao said.

‘What did they want from him?’ Ev’r asked.

‘I don’t know. They were chanting – something about blood.’

Ev’r gripped the bed frame and almost doubled over. Eli saw that the black on her fingertips had started to spread again along her fingers and hands.

‘Time to go,’ he said to Lao. ‘Do you need any of this equipment?’

‘Just my medicine.’ He pointed to the bottle of pills on the bedside table. ‘It’s for my allergy.’

Eli grabbed the bottle and noticed the medication was the same one that he took for his allergies, except his tooth refill was in liquid form. A thought sprouted in his mind.

‘You wouldn’t be a cross-breed by any chance, would you?’ he asked.

The man’s eyebrows lifted. It wasn’t a question that was usually asked so directly, if at all. ‘Yes I am, actually,’ he replied. ‘My father was part human-breed.’ He pulled back the covers and manoeuvred himself out of bed. Beak6 flapped to his shoulder.

Eli turned to Ev’r. ‘I think I know how to help Luther.’

‘Who?’ Ev’r asked. She clutched at a pain in her stomach.

‘The Midnight Man cross-breed. I don’t think it’s just the metamorphosis that’s making him sick; I think it might also be an allergy that’s stopping him taking in nutrients. Allergies appear to be common for mixed people. I know several others in the same situation. I hadn’t made the link before, but maybe Luther’s allergies are just flaring up now that he’s reaching maturity, like a delayed effect because of the way a Midnight Man’s body changes at the time of metamorphosis. Maybe if I treated his allergy, he wouldn’t need to eat the near-dead to change and survive. Maybe he just needs to —’

The door to the room swung open and a nurse stood in the doorway, holding a tray of medication. She looked from Eli to Ev’r to Lao, then dropped the tray with a clattering crash and screamed. Eli screamed as well. Ev’r grabbed him and the Androt by the wrist and sank them into the Murk.

Eli plummeted through the uncertain space behind space. He could hear Lao yelling in agony. Eli found it didn’t hurt him as much as it had the first time, but it was still painful and disorientating. It was like one of his recurring nightmares where he was running away from something bad, but could never quite focus his eyes.

Colour suddenly ripped into the grey and the three of them sprawled out onto the concrete in the middle of the largest shopping level in the city. It was packed with people enjoying the all-night sales in honour of the noctus-renium. Shoppers cried out and scattered in all directions. Some froze to stare at them. A pleasant upbeat tune jingled in the background. Eli scrambled to his feet and pushed the Androt and Ev’r into a side street. He checked Nelly in his pocket and felt that she was alright – sleeping soundly.

‘Quick.’ Ev’r grimaced and clutched at her stomach. ‘The Skreaf were in the Murk. They’re onto us.’

Lao moaned in fear and held his injured arm.

Not far from where they had dropped out, the two guardians from the hospital appeared from around a corner and began scoping for them with body-form sensors.

‘You two keep going. I’ll try to lead them away,’ Eli said.

‘No,’ Ev’r argued. ‘We stay together.’

‘You’re both sick!’ Eli said. ‘I can fly. Just go. I’ll find you!’

Eli darted out from the side street and the military sensors instantly locked onto him. The guardians spun in his direction. Eli ripped off his shirt, buzzed his wings and took off. He kept to the packed shopping strip, jumping off people’s shoulders and scrambling through the crowd, using them as a shield. The guardians struggled to keep up, nowhere near as fast as he was and unable to discharge their electrifiers or to use their dark-words with so many witnesses around. He raced past the centre of the open mall, past a stage of performing dancers. Someone yelled behind him and the sound was answered by more shouting and frightened screams.

Eli glanced over his shoulder. Gangsters from the Crook’d Town Pride had spread out behind him, and all around them shoppers were fleeing as fast as they could go. The Pride’s feline companions roared and flexed dagger claws. The guardians chasing Eli were forced to stop and question the gangsters. Eli, sure that Ev’r and Lao would have had time to disappear, took the opportunity to vanish as well. Whirring his wings, he flew upwards, above the lamp lights lining the strip and further into the sky. He flew parallel with an enormous, many-storeyed transflyer parking centre. He ducked through onto one of the higher levels and dropped down behind the wheels of the closest craft. As he was pulling his shirt back on, he heard approaching voices. Peering from his hiding place towards the sound, he saw that two human-breed women, laden with shopping bags of all colours, were heading to their craft. Their voices echoed in the quiet of the parking lot and he picked up on their conversation.

‘They just came and dragged him out of the house. They didn’t even explain why. They just said he was being detained by the state. Camilla was devastated. That Androt had been with them for years. I think it’s wrong.’

The other woman, with the long neck and pursed lips of a goose-blood human-breed, cast a nervous look around the parking lot and said, ‘Let’s talk more inside the craft.’

They disappeared behind a row of transflyers and left Eli to consider their words. They supported his theory that the witches were using the United Regiment to hunt Kry. Eli realised that in locating Kry’s cousin, they now actually had a chance of finding Kry himself before the Skreaf did.

He grabbed his communicator and checked Ev’r’s location. She was moving through a lower level of the city. The machine buzzed and displayed a message that the results from the elements analysis had been sent from the laboratory’s system. He glanced around for witnesses then opened the communicator’s holo-screen to read the outcomes. The ingredients of the potion that Ev’r needed flashed up. Eli stared, reading through the list with growing disbelief. All the ingredients were either impossible to come by without spending a lifetime searching for them, or were completely extinct. There was zero chance he would be able to re-create the potion in time to save Ev’r.

His communicator buzzed with an incoming call and he saw it was the woman herself. He breathed in deeply and answered, ‘Ev’r.’

‘You clear?’ she asked.

‘Yes – are you?’ he replied.

‘Far as I can tell.’ Her voice gasped at the end of the sentence and Eli winced. The slowing elixir he had given her wasn’t having as much effect as last time.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked her.

‘The Androt says he knows a place to lie low. He thinks Kry will be there.’

‘Perfect,’ Eli said. ‘Ev’r, you have to convince Kry to come with us so that we can protect him.’

She grunted agreement. ‘Did you get the lab results?’

‘Yes,’ Eli said and cringed. He had been trying to lie and say no.

‘And?’

‘It’s all good, I’ll be able to get the potion together,’ he said in a falsely positive tone.

‘Then it better be soon because . . .’ She didn’t finish and she didn’t need to – the growl behind her voice was enough. Eli gulped.

‘Keep your communicator with you. I’ll find you,’ he said.

She disconnected.

‘What am I going to do?’ Eli whispered, holding his head in one hand. He had to find an alternative cure for Ev’r, but before that he needed to find out where the Skreaf had taken the Mazurus Machine. He stretched out his aching legs, his closed eyes prickling with tiredness. The ground shuddered underneath him as another mini-quake shook the city. It spurred him to keep moving. He dragged himself up and spoke to Nelly, who was peeping out of his pocket.

‘Plan B – on all accounts.’

She chattered nervously and Eli said, ‘I know. I wish we didn’t have to either, but we’re running out of options.’

He gave her some fish treats to calm her then clipped his communicator back in place and stepped out from behind the transflyer.

Caesar K-Ruz crouched on the railing of the parking level just ahead of him. His nocturnal eyes glowed in the darkness and his shadow beast stalked along the wall beside him.

‘Where is he?’ Caesar demanded.

‘Who?’ Eli squeaked.

‘Shawe.’

‘I don’t know.’ Eli shook his head.

‘He’s with Kane. Have you had any contact?’

‘No – I mean
yes
, but we didn’t discuss locations or Shawe.’

‘Call your boss and get a location – now,’ Caesar ordered.

‘I can’t. I have to wait for the hedge we’re running between our systems to complete, otherwise the Regiment will pick up on the signal.’

‘How long?’

‘I’m not sure – there’s been some damage to the machines and a lot of interference. They’re definitely targeting the commander’s lines. It could be some time —’

‘Then we’ll wait – together,’ Caesar said, settling down on the railing.

‘I can’t wait,’ Eli said, panic stirring nerves in his wings. ‘The Skreaf are taking over. I have to keep working.’

‘You’ll wait,’ the Pride boss responded. It wasn’t a request.

Eli stepped from one foot to the other, gnawing on his lip with frustration. Obviously if his main focus was on killing Shawe and taking over the Gangland, Caesar hadn’t comprehended exactly how dire their situation was and how much worse it could become.

‘Instead of killing Shawe, can’t you just banish him like the olden-day kings used to – just declare him gone and take over his rule?’ Eli suggested.

‘No. Shawe must die. It is Gangland law.’

‘So change the law.’ Eli’s voice rose slightly, his urgency overcoming his fear of the gangster.

‘Who am I to do that?’ Caesar said.

‘The warlord Damesai said,
rules are set by the powerful and re-written by the great
,’ Eli said, thinking quickly. ‘I don’t know whether you realise this, but you are great. Everyone looks up to you, even your rivals, and it’s not because of your religious adherence to the law – it’s because you’re different. If I were you, I would make changes. I would let Shawe live just as an example of what I could do.’