Avalon

CHAPTER 35

THE BULLET BOOMED OUTWARD, STRIKING RENFORD between the eyes. Then it sailed onward, leaving a trail of blood and brain matter chasing after it.

Renford seemed to fall in slow motion, taking Cora with him. She landed on top of him, cushioned by his body. Cora rolled off him at once and began to wail.

Jeth stared in horror at the sight of his little sister soaked in the blood of the man he’d just murdered.

The noise of the door being wrenched open sounded behind Jeth. He spun as Vince, Lizzie, Flynn, and Shady came through it. In the brief moment before the door closed again, Jeth saw more than fifty soldiers in the kid center beyond. The real ITA had arrived.

They’d come for Cora.

Defeat pressed down on him. They’d come so far only to fail now.

Vince wrenched the control panel beside the door off the wall, sealing them in and the ITA out, at least for the moment.

“Is there any way out of here?” Shady shouted over Cora’s sobs. Nobody answered.

Jeth just stood there, numb with shock. He kept seeing the bullet hit Renford. Kept seeing him fall. Vince ran over to Sierra, who was kneeling beside Cora, trying to calm her as her distress worsened by the second.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Lizzie said. “Sierra, is there a way?”

“Shhhhh,” Sierra said, stroking Cora’s hair. She seemed to be in a daze, too.

“Sierra!” Lizzie said.

Sierra shook her head. “They sealed the emergency exit when they moved Cora in here.”

Cora’s cries turned into screams, the sound terribly familiar. Jeth drew a breath, remembering what had happened on the Donerail. The realization of what was coming snapped him out of his stupor. He took a step toward Cora, gaining control of himself. “Cora—”

She backed away from him, her wide, tear-reddened eyes fixed on his face. She was afraid of him. Of course she was. He’d just killed a man right in front of her. An ache far deeper than muscle flourished inside his chest.

“Step back, Jeth,” Vince said. Jeth did so, reeling with guilt.

Sierra reached out and pulled Cora toward her, embracing her in a tight hug. “It’s okay, Cora. It’s okay. You’ve got to calm down. Remember what we talked about?”

Cora pulled away from Sierra, her expression confused.

The soldiers were banging on the door now, threatening to break through.

Cora’s screams grew even louder, the terrible noise like something being rent alive.

“Calm down, Cora. Calm down,” Sierra said.

Something like an electrical charge began to swell inside the room. Cora’s shrieks seemed to pierce Jeth’s skull. He dropped to his knees, the gun slipping from his fingers. He bent over, hands pressed against his ears, trying to block it out. Around him the others were doing the same. Except for Sierra, who was trying in vain to calm the now-hysterical Cora.

A sound like ripping metal mixed in with the screams. Jeth forced his head up, looking for the source of the new noise. A giant hole had appeared in the wall to his right, giving him a clear view of the kid center. Beyond it, he saw more holes appearing before his eyes, as if that first one had been a pebble dropped into still water.

Anything in the path of those holes either vanished completely or was sliced in half. The rock wall came crashing down as a hole tore through its base. Jeth watched in horror as more than a dozen soldiers fell, their bodies in pieces.

Cora kept on screaming, the sound out of control now. The lights began to flicker and the floor to shake. Jeth looked left as another hole appeared on the opposite wall. This one was smaller than the first one, but it wasn’t empty. Pieces of the soldiers cut down in the other room were inside it, their bodies phased into the wall itself.

“Stop it, Cora,” Sierra was saying. “You’ve got to stop, sweetie.”

Jeth looked back and saw some of the remaining soldiers had worked up the courage to peer through the first hole. In a moment, they would be inside. Jeth closed his eyes, summoning the will to pick up the gun in front of him. It was so hard to move with Cora’s screams inside his head. He grabbed hold of the hilt and managed to point it one-handed toward the soldiers.

A hot, searing pain went through his hand, and a scream tore from his throat. He looked down to see the gun had vanished.

So had his fingers. They’d been sliced off at the knuckles.

Jeth gripped his wrist with his uninjured hand, too shocked to scream again. There wasn’t any blood, as if the phase had cauterized the cut, but there was plenty of pain. He was sick with it, his head spinning and his stomach gripped with nausea.

“Jeth!” Lizzie screamed. She crawled over to him and grabbed his shoulders. Jeth wanted to push her away but couldn’t. His entire body was locked down by the agony rolling through him.

All the while, Cora kept screaming. Another hole appeared in the floor in front of Jeth, less than a meter from him and Lizzie.

Lizzie let go of him and turned toward Cora. She grabbed her hand. “Make it stop, Cora. He’s our brother. Our brother! Don’t you know what that is? Don’t you understand?”

Cora’s screams lessened a fraction in intensity. Jeth slumped forward, as if the strength of those screams alone had been holding him up.

“Please, Cora. Concentrate,” Sierra said.

Cora’s screams abruptly ceased.

Gathering what remained of his energy, Jeth turned his head to look at her. She stood encircled by Lizzie and Sierra, both of them kneeling in front of her, holding her hands.

“Send us away from here,” Sierra said. “You can save us, Cora. Send us to the ship. All of us. You remember Avalon, right? And Milton? And Viggo? They’re there, waiting for us. Come on, Cora. Come on.”

“I’m sorry, Cora,” Jeth said, somehow managing to speak through his delirium. His voice sounded no louder than a whisper, yet somehow she must’ve heard him as she shifted her gaze toward him. Her dark eyes glistened with tears. There was something so familiar about her, Jeth realized. Something comforting. He gasped. “You look just like her,” he said, seeing the resemblance for the first time. “So much like Mom.”

Then Jeth rolled onto his back as blackness began to slip over his eyes like ink pooling around the edges of his vision.

And just before he felt himself go under, a bright light filled his gaze.

And then there was nothing.

Nothing at all.