In front of the shift, Third Layer vehicles of all sizes flew toward us from multiple directions, dodging the jaws of the total shift with long practice and focused intent.
“No one good is on those transports.” I held the cuff, breath coming in small heaves. Panic was pulling my vision into spirals. I could see a new world at the end of the spiraled tunnel.
But it wasn’t our world.
If I followed it...
“No one in this blasted layer can be defined by that word,” Constantine spit. “We will be penned in one minute.”
He looked at my cuff and his fingers twitched as if to take it from me, but then he reached out and clasped it around my skin, muting the feelings of power. “She can’t do it. Pave this layer,” he said viciously to his roommate.
Axer shrugged out of his damaged battle cloak, and flexed his arms. Offensive magic, without a lick of the defensive magic inherent to wearing the cloaks, flowed in spiral designs down the skin below his black t-shirt as he calculated the distance of each caravan.
In response, the vehicles immediately zoomed sideways, in less distinctive patterns.
Axer smiled. “That won't help you,” he whispered to them, and the spirals increased speed along his skin—pulling into devastating patterns that I recognized. The death shift increased speed commensurately, as if anticipating such Pyrrhic victory.
“Weren’t you the sane one of the three of us a moment ago?” I asked. Adrenaline suppressed unhelpful emotions while the cuff suppressed the overwhelming feelings of infinite possibility. I fished Will's portal pad from the collected mess in my bag. Safety first, guilt and despair after. I quickly nudged the passive spell component that expanded the pad’s size parameters.
Axer cocked his head, gazing back at me from the corner of one eye, attuned to every change when in such a state. His magic immediately coiled back, spirals zipping up his arms, and he scooped up Rock Guard as the fitted cloak draped itself back around him.
“Sanity doesn’t mean I can’t revel in unavoidable provocation—just that I can recognize a better alternative when given one.”
He released the collected magic with a snap and the death shift responded by aggressively eating a few vehicles whose drivers weren’t quick enough to dodge.
“The drivers better have magical insurance or some really good protections,” I said, sparing a quick glance around the horizon.
Constantine’s face was carved from granite. “I will destroy every one of those Western Thirdies.” Darkness and certainty rolled through Constantine's emotions like the shift through the bleakness in the distance.
Tuning the pad with quick movements, I said, “I think that's a pejorative term.” Delia had never liked the term, that was for sure.
“I will pejorative their blood vessels. I will pejorative their children. You built that complex, you imbued it with your magic, you gave and gave, and they shoved—”
The pad opened to size. I grabbed Constantine—Axer’s hand already wrapped around my arm—and stuffed all of us through.
The layer shift violently increased speed and rolled over as the portal pad suctioned closed. Tus Onus was the programmed destination. Popping into an active troop encampment outside of it was not.
“—shoved you from the very place you conceived. That you—”
“There they are!”
I jolted as shouts and spells zinged toward us. Axer threw up a shield as the three of us fell to the ground simultaneously.
“—conceived. That you—”
I flared the used, narrowing pad outward like Constantine’s ribbon, draping it over us. A tunnel of darkness and flashing light spit us—as well as a section of the ground that had been around us—into the bright desert, and into a legion of armed brigands.
Axer’s shield was the only thing that saved us.
“—built. That you—”
Constantine didn’t stop speaking, but he grabbed the edge of the shrinking pad and furiously tugged it around us again.
We emerged teetering on the edge of a waterfall streaming over a rocky gorge.
A water dragon broke from the surface, and a rider with skin the color of the sky was balanced on its back propelling a spear of white toward us.
Axer spun the three of us as the spear whispered past, then pushed us into the pad once more.
We flopped on the hard ground of a wooded glen in a recently devastated section of the Fourth Layer. Ley circles spread before us and golden light sparked as my finger touched one.
“—made invulnerable.”
Two men in tattered robes emerged from the trees, eyes lighting manically. “The Origin Mage.”
A spell pit broke beneath us, sending us falling.
“Even better—”
A trap set for someone or something else was still a trap we couldn’t afford to be caught in. I forced the pad below us with a blast of magic.
Horns blared, an inhuman roar ripped through the air, and the men above swore. “They are coming! Hurry, grab her!”
We fell into the pad and instead of hitting the bottom of the pit, we were pitched out onto the hard pavement of the Third Layer city of Fawn that I had used more than once for transit.
Stavros was right—and not just about a pre-programmed pad—I defaulted to the same paths. It was a weakness and a habit I had to break.
I was unfamiliar with the two places the boys had chosen—both Fourth Layer spots—but suffice to say that we were either picking poorly or we were being tracked quickly.
“A bit of both, I think,” Axer answered, as all the people visible on the sidewalks slowly and cautiously backed away from us, some touching the skin beneath their ears. “We have twenty seconds. See if you can give us forty on the next one.”
“I’ll give them forty years,” Constantine said darkly. “Of flooding, of famine, of—”
I twisted the pad’s parameters to a place I had never been, but one I had starred on a mental map as a possible place to transport ferals to in the future. I tugged Axer and Constantine inside as Third Layer terrorists appeared.
We emerged in the wasteland, outside a small, dead space in the Third Layer.
Easily manipulated with minimal magic and not subject to shifts in the same way, dead spaces were scattered around the Third Layer. Each was a tiny oasis in the treacherous landscape—the paths to them known to the outlaws who traveled the badlands. Frost Viper had made certain I knew them all by the end of my first week in the compound.
I pushed both boys into the dead space as the shift spurred by our arrival rolled over the landscape. In the Third Layer, shifts were a constant constraint.
“I will make them rue,” Constantine said, barely stopping his continued diatribe for a breath.