I fire the pistol, aim horrible. The bullets skitter off his armor. Two hundred kilograms of man raises an ionAxe, its battery dead, but edge still keen. He ululates his kind’s throaty war chant and red mist geysers from his helmet. Bullet through the skull-helm’s eye socket. His body pitches forward, slides. Nearly knocks me off my feet. Trigg’s already moving to the next target, driving metal into men as patiently as a craftsman driving nails into wood. No passion there. No art. Just training and physics.
“Reaper, move your ass!” Holiday shouts. She jerks me down a hall away from the chaos as Trigg follows, hurling a sticky grenade onto the thigh of an unarmored Gold who dodges four of his rifle shots. Whoomph. Bone and meat to mist.
The siblings reload on the run and I just try not to faint or fall. “Right in fifty paces, then up the stairs!” Holiday snaps. “We’ve got seven minutes.”
The halls are eerily quiet. No sirens. No lights. No whir of heated air through the vents. Just the clunk of our boots and distant shouts and the cracking of my joints and the rasping of lungs. We pass a window. Ships, black and dead, fall through the sky. Small fires burn where others have landed. Trams grind to a halt on magnetic rails. The only lights that still run are from the two most distant peaks. Reinforcements with tech will soon respond, but they won’t know what caused this. Where to look. With camera systems and biometric scanners dead, Cassius and Aja won’t be able to find us. That might save our lives.
We run up the stairs. A cramp eats into my right calf and hamstring. I grunt and almost fall. Holiday takes most of my weight. Her powerful neck pressing up against my armpit. Three Grays spot us from behind at the bottom of the long marble stairs. Shoving me aside, she takes two down with her rifle, but the third fires back. Bullets chewing into marble.
“They’ve got gas backups,” Holiday barks. “Gotta move. Gotta move.”
Two more rights, past several lowColors, who stare at me, mouths agape, through marble halls with towering ceilings and Greek statues, past galleries where the Jackal keeps his stolen artifacts and once showed me Hancock’s declaration and the preserved head of the last ruler of the American Empire.
Muscles burning. Side splitting.
“Here!” Holiday finally cries.
We reach a service door in a side hall and push through into cold daylight. The wind swallows me. Icy teeth ripping through my jumpsuit as the four of us stumble out onto a metal walkway along the side of the Jackal’s fortress. To our right, the stone of the mountain surrenders to the modern metal-and-glass edifice above. It’s a thousand-meter drop to our left. Snow swirls around the mountain’s face. Wind howls. We push forward along the walkway till it circles part of the fortress and links with a paved bridge that extends from the mountain to an abandoned landing platform like a skeletal arm holding out a concrete dinner plate covered in snow.
“Four minutes,” Holiday hollers as she helps me struggle across the bridge toward the landing pad. At the end, she dumps me onto the ground. I set Victra down beside me. A hard skin of ice makes the concrete slick and smoky gray. Snowdrifts gather around the waist-high concrete wall that fences in the circular landing pad from the thousand-meter drop.
“Got eighty in the long mag, six in the relic,” he calls to his sister. “Then I’m out.”
“Got twelve,” she says, tossing down a small canister. It pops and green smoke swirls into the air. “Gotta hold the bridge.”
“I’ve got six mines.”
“Plant them.”
He sprints back down the bridge. At the end of it is a set of closed blast doors, much larger than the maintenance path we took from the side. Shivering and snowblind, I pull Victra close to me against that wall to escape the wind. Snowflakes gather atop the black rain gear she wears. Fluttering down like the ash that fell when Cassius, Sevro, and I burned Minerva’s citadel and stole their cook. “We’ll be fine,” I tell her. “We’ll make it.” I peer over the short concrete wall to the city beneath. It’s oddly peaceful. All her sounds, all her troubles silenced by the EMP. I watch a flake of snow larger than the rest drift on the wind and come to rest on my knuckle.
How did I get here? A boy of the mines now a shivering fallen warlord staring down at a darkened city, hoping against everything that he can go home. I close my eyes, wishing I was with my friends, my family.
“Three minutes,” Holiday says behind me. Her gloved hand touches my shoulder protectively as she looks to the sky for our enemies. “Three minutes and we’re out of here. Just three minutes.”
I wish I could believe her, but the snow has stopped falling.
I squint up past Holiday as an iridescent defensive shield ripples into place over the seven peaks of Attica, cutting us off from the clouds and the sky beyond. The shield generator must have been out of the EMP’s blast range. No help will come to us from beyond it.
“Trigg! Get back here!” she shouts as he plants the last mine on the bridge.
A single gunshot shatters the winter morning. Echoing brittle and cold. More follow. Crack. Crack. Crack. Snow kicks around him. He sprints back as Holiday leans to cover for him, her rifle rocking her shoulder. Straining, I push myself up. My eyes ache as they try to focus in the sun’s light. Concrete explodes in front of me. Shards rip into my face. I duck down, shivering in fear. The Jackal’s men have found their backup weapons.
I peer out again. Through squinting lids, I see Trigg pinned down halfway to us, exchanging gunfire with a squad of Grays carrying gas-powered rifles. They pour out of the fortress’s blast doors, now opened at the opposite end of the bridge. Two go down. Two more step near a proximity mine and disappear in a cloud of smoke as Trigg shoots it at their feet. Holiday picks another off just as Trigg staggers back into cover, hit with a round in the shoulder. He jams a stimshot into his thigh and pops back up. A bullet slaps into the concrete in front of me, kicks up into Holiday to impact her ribs just under the armpit of her body armor with a meaty thud.
She spins down. Bullets force me to crouch beside her. Concrete rains. She spits blood and there’s a wet, phlegmy echoing to her breath.
“It’s in my lung,” she gasps as she fumbles with a stimshot from her leg pouch. Were the circuits of her armor not fried, meds would inject automatically. But she has to crack open the case and pull a dose manually. I help, pulling free one of the micro-syringes and injecting her in the neck. Her pupils dilate and her breath slows as the narcotic drifts through her blood. Beside me, Victra’s eyes are closed.
The gunfire stops. Carefully, I peek out. The Jackal’s Grays hide behind concrete walls and pylons across the bridge, some sixty meters away. Trigg reloads. The wind is the only sound. Something’s wrong. I search the sky, fearing the quiet. A Gold is coming. I can feel it in the battle’s pulse.
“Trigg!” I shout till my body shudders. “Run!”
Holiday sees the look on my face. She struggles up, wheezing in pain as Trigg abandons his cover, boots slipping on the ice-slicked bridge. He falls and gains his feet, scrambling toward us, terrified. Too late. Behind him, Aja au Grimmus rips out of the fortress’s door, past the Grays, past the Obsidians who lurk in the shadows. She’s in her black formal jacket. Her long legs reel Trigg in now. It’s one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen.
I fire my pistol. Holiday unloads her rifle. We hit nothing but air. Aja sidesteps, twists, and, when Trigg is ten paces from us, spears him through the torso with her razor. Metal glistens wetly from his sternum. Shock widens his eyes. His mouth makes a quiet gasp. And he screams as he’s hauled into the air. Pried upward by Aja’s razor like a twitching pond frog on the end of a makeshift spear.
“Trigg…” Holiday whispers.
I stumble forward, toward Aja, pulling my razor, but Holiday jerks me back behind the wall as bullets from the distant Grays rip into the concrete around us. Her blood melts the snow under her. “Don’t be stupid,” she snarls, dragging me to the ground with the last of her strength. “We can’t help him.”
“He’s your brother!”