Trapped (41 page)

Annah, leading the way, peeked through the wall's ragged hole. She quickly pulled her head back again.

"What do you see?" Impervia whispered.

"Bodies." Annah took a breath to settle herself. "I think they were Keepers; they're wearing brown robes like monks. The Keepers had set up a reception party outside the elevators—plenty of guns, fancy ones, not ordinary firearms—and I suppose they intended to shoot as soon as the elevator doors opened. But the doors didn't open; the wall blew out on top of them like an avalanche. The Keepers didn't have a chance."

"Stupid of them," Impervia said. "They should have positioned themselves farther back. Given themselves plenty of safety range."

Annah shook her head. "They didn't have enough room. When the OldTechs built this place, they didn't think to put in a proper kill-zone."

Impervia tsked her tongue at such lack of foresight. I decided it was pointless to mention this plant had been a commercial installation, not a military one; Impervia wouldn't have understood the distinction.

Instead, I continued down the ladder until I could see the carnage for myself. The room in front of me was lit with electric lights, very bright after the darkness of the elevator shaft. The place looked like a formal reception area, a spot where visiting dignitaries might gather before a tour of the generating machinery: high-ceilinged, with an ample supply of plush chairs and sofas. At one time, the furniture must have been spaced around the room... but now it was all drawn up in a barricade near the far wall. The Keepers had hidden behind that line, waiting to open fire. Unfortunately for them, their defenses had been no match for exploding rubble—heavy chunks of masonry had blasted out of the wall, smashing through chairs and couches, crushing the people behind. Male and female Keepers lay bleeding beside the barrier, most with fragments of concrete piercing their skulls.

"Jode must have known they'd be waiting here," the Caryatid said.

"Either that," I said, "or Sebastian just looked through the wall and saw them." I thought about nanites filling the air—ready to transmit remote images into the boy's brain whenever he requested. "If Jode asked, 'What's ahead of us?' Sebastian could easily find out."

Annah frowned. "If Sebastian knew people were out here, would he really cause an explosion to kill them all?"

"Why not?" Impervia asked. "Jode has convinced the boy this building is headquarters for the Ring of Knives. Filled with vicious criminals, and commanded by Rosalind's evil mother who wants to interfere with true love. Then, what does Sebastian see when he gets here? People with guns, ready to shoot first and ask questions later."

"Don't forget," I added, "Myoko constantly warned Sebastian about groups like the Ring. She believed all such organizations enslaved psychics; she'd have told the boy he mustn't pull his punches if he ever fought them. Be ruthless, show no mercy—you know how Myoko talked. So even without Jode urging him on, Sebastian would be inclined to rip through anyone who stood in his way."

"He wouldn't listen to Pelinor," Impervia pointed out. "And he won't listen to us the next time we meet him. He thinks we're doppelgängers working for Rosalind's mother. Bags of skin filled with pus."

The Caryatid gave a soft sound that might have been a growl. "We'll show him it's Jode who fits that description. Let's get moving."

Annah went first, still on the lookout for traps. She stepped down to the roof of an elevator car and walked to the hole in the wall. Since the hole was more than two meters above the next room's floor, Annah seated herself on the edge of the broken concrete, then turned and lowered herself as far as she could, hanging on to the lip of the hole with her hands. She still had to drop the last half meter: landing without a sound, her black cloak billowing.

That's when the Keeper stirred and lifted his gun.

It was a young man, plump and bald, with blood smearing his face from where his left eye had been pulped by hurtling debris. He must have been knocked out by the initial blast, then left for dead by Jode and Sebastian. When he woke again, his first thought was to fire on the closest target: Annah. Maybe he was so dedicated to the Holy Lightning, he wanted to spend his last breath destroying what he believed was an intruder; maybe he just wanted to make someone pay for his ruined eye; maybe he was so dazed, he didn't know what he was doing. But he hadn't lost his weapon when the wall blew out on top of him. All he had to do was raise the muzzle.

I shouted to Annah, "Down, down, down!" The Keeper fired before I howled the second, "Down!" but I kept yelling, unable to stop myself.

Annah began to drop flat to the floor... then all hell broke loose.

The Keeper's weapon was an Element gun—a four-barreled monster of overkill invented by Spark Royal. The guns were rare, but my grandmother had received one as a gift the day she was anointed as governor. She'd let me examine it many years later: a big chunky rifle with four barrels arranged in a diamond, one for each of the classical Greek elements.

Earth: ordinary lead slugs, shot at high-velocity.

Fire: a gout of burning gas like a mini-flamethrower.

Air: a focused hypersonic barrage, causing no serious damage but able to knock out a charging rhino for hours.

Water: a stream of acid, corrosive enough to eat through steel.

Element guns were versatile weapons that could harmlessly subdue a single target or incinerate a mob. The guns had their limitations: they were brutally heavy, they couldn't be reloaded except by the Sparks, and you had only a few shots on any one setting. Still, if you liked a lot of options for wanton destruction, an Element gun fit the bill. You could fire each barrel separately, or mix and match to tailor your attack to your target.

The Keeper fired all four barrels at Annah. Simultaneously. The resulting blast was a pandemonium of light and sound, a blare of pure chaos that lasted only a fraction of a second; but in my mind's eye, it seemed to break into distinct pieces that each lasted forever.

I imagined the bullets reaching her first: an eruption of lead traveling faster than sound. Since she'd been diving forward, facing the shooter, the slugs would hit her in the head, the shoulders, and chest.

The hypersonics would arrive next. It was the same kind of attack Opal had talked about—the pistol she'd been carrying in the tobacco field. It hadn't affected the Lucifer, but I prayed it would work on Annah: frazzling her nervous system, hammering her into merciful unconsciousness so she couldn't feel the horrors to come.

Then fire. A flammable gas, something that blazed bright orange, pouring in a burning jet. Igniting her clothes, her hair, her beautiful skin.

Finally, the acid, its spray traveling slower than bullets, sound, and fire. Acid splashing onto the flames. I couldn't tell whether the acid would burn off harmlessly, or if the heat would make it work that much faster: disintegrating what was left of Annah's corpse.

Annah's
corpse.

Then it was all over. The Keeper toppled forward across the furniture barricade, smoke pouring off his body. The gun clattered from his hands. Impervia leapt to the floor as if there was something she could do for Annah, but I remained frozen where I was.

The Caryatid slumped beside me. Her face was damp; not tears, but perspiration. "Ugh," she said. "Let's not do that again."

I stared at her, shocked at her lack of feeling for Annah. Before I could speak, something fluttered down in the room: Impervia had just kicked Annah's cloak and a few more pieces of clothing halfway across the floor. "Get down here, Phil!" Impervia snapped. "We need your first aid kit."

We?

I leaned over the edge of the hole. Lying tight against the wall was Annah, stripped to her underwear and blood drenching her left arm, but still very much alive.

She looked at me and smiled. "Keepers might be good with electrical things, but they sure are lousy shots."

I held her in my arms as Impervia bandaged Annah's only wound: a bullet had passed in and out of her left biceps muscle, missing the bone and all major blood vessels. As she'd said, the Keeper had been a lousy shot—not too surprising for a man who'd lost one eye and was dazed from being battered unconscious. All but one of the bullets had gone wild, and the hypersonic stun-wave was off target too.

Annah would still have been cremated by the flamethrower if not for quick work by the Caryatid—our mistress of fire had redirected the blaze back at the shooter before Annah was hit. (Good-bye, poor misguided Keeper.) That left only the acid, also badly aimed; Annah's thick winter outfit protected her from the caustic splash, and she'd managed to peel off her clothes before the corrosive fluids ate through to her flesh. (Smoke still rose from the discarded bundle of cloth. Her long parka was pocked through with holes, as if chewed by huge moths. The black cloak that let her vanish in the dark had vanished itself—totally consumed by the ravaging chemicals.)

But Annah was safe. Shot, yes, and trying not to wince as Impervia wrapped bright white bandages around her dark arm; but when I considered the alternative...

I held her tightly and lowered my face against the top of her head. I didn't cry; I just breathed in the warm fragrance of her hair.

"Phil... Phil!" The Caryatid was shaking my shoulder. "We have to get going right now."

"Can't we let Annah rest—"

"No," the Caryatid interrupted. "I heard voices up the elevator shaft. They're whispering, but the shaft carries echoes a long way."

"Probably the Ring of Knives," Impervia said. "No doubt, Mother Tzekich has been running around Niagara Falls, asking at every hotel if they've seen Sebastian and her daughter. She must have found someone who saw the two heading this way."

Either that, I thought, or Tzekich noticed the Falls had stopped flowing and came to investigate. She'd have seen Pelinor's body in the roadway, immediately in front of the power plant. After that, it was just a matter of following our tracks.

Annah put her hand on my cheek. She was bandaged now—looking painfully vulnerable in nothing but underwear, and probably weak from blood loss—but her smile was genuine. "We have to go before they get here. I'm strong enough. Really."

I helped her to her feet. As I did, Impervia slipped off her own winter coat and draped it around Annah's shoulders. "No," I said, "I'll give her
my
coat."

"She's already got mine," Impervia said. "I don't need it—this place is heated. Anyway, a coat will only slow me down if the time comes for... punishing the wicked."

Impervia smacked her right fist into her left palm. I stifled a laugh. In the past twenty-four hours, Impervia had been kicked by fishermen, gut-punched by Hump, kicked by Zunctweed, tossed around by Sebastian... and
still
she was looking for a fight.

Annah whispered softly in my ear, "That's what happens to some people when they take a vow of celibacy."

When I stifled the laugh this time, I nearly hurt myself.

I kept my arm around Annah as we moved forward; I don't know if she really needed my support, but she didn't push me away.

As we passed the fallen Keepers, Annah suddenly stopped. I thought she just needed to rest—but she bent down and pried an Element gun from its dead owner's grip.

"You want one too?" she asked.

Thinking of Pelinor and Myoko, I nodded. This was not just a quest; this was war.

A single door led forward. It had once been equipped with a fancy electronic lock connected to a keypad. Half the keypad was missing now, along with a chunk of the door frame. Sebastian hadn't wasted time on delicacy.

Beyond lay a short corridor with a door in each side wall and another at the far end. All three doors had been blown off their hinges.

The side doorways opened into locker rooms where the plant's OldTech personnel had changed from street clothes into whatever work-suits they wore on the job. The lockers had been knocked helter-skelter, some tossed against the walls, others cracked open like eggs. I wondered if Sebastian had smashed around the lockers just to show he could... or because he'd begun to
like
pointless mayhem.

Our friend Caryatid had also developed a liking for displays of mystical force. Before this business started, I'd never seen her juggle flames any larger than a big candle—but now she'd built a blaze the size of a cow's head, floating in front of us at chest height and pouring out heat like a furnace. No one dared step within five paces of it... no one except the Caryatid, whose face glistened with heat-sweat. She barely seemed to notice; she and her flameball just plowed ahead toward the next smashed-in doorway.

The entrance to the main machine room.

The place was as big as the academy's main building: a single chamber more than four stories high and a hundred meters square, its ceiling supported by dozens of pillars. The walls and floors were painted kelp-green; they tinted the space like a sea-grotto, ripe and weedy. In OldTech times, the place must have been brightly lit—bank upon bank of fluorescent fixtures hung from the roof, with multiple light-tubes in each fixture. But the days were long gone when such tubes could be mass-produced. Three-quarters of the fixtures had no light at all, and the remainder each only held a single long bulb. The result was an oceanic dimness, a full-fathom-five gloom filled with shadows.

Most of the shadows came from huge turbines held down by massive bolts that passed through the plastic floor and down into firmer footings below... possibly all the way to bedrock. The turbines were great hulking things with monstrous cooling fans, the actual turbine blades unseen under thick metal hoods. Water from the Falls ran through pipes beneath the false floor, rushing through the turbines and out again to the river. I had the impression this place should be deafeningly loud—roaring water, spinning metal, whirling fans—but the room had gone lethally silent. With the Falls dammed up, the tumult was suspended.

We could see no movement. No one was close to the door we'd just entered, and our view farther in was blocked by the ponderous machinery. A single corpse lay halfway between us and the nearest turbine: a middle-aged woman in brown Keeper's habit, facedown with a spill of moist white nuggets puddled on the floor beneath her. After choking her, the white goo had dribbled out of her mouth. The Caryatid dispatched a fireball to incinerate the alien curds; they burned with a hissing splutter, the only sound in the whole cavernous space.