City of Souls

25

It was impossible to keep my feet beneath me, so I rode the filthy, rushing waves, the raging current easily whisking me into the dark. I was shocked at how loud the water was inside, and by how many other things were swept away with me; tires, wood planks, unlucky animals, discarded clothing, even sheet metal, which banged against my torso and thighs as I was whipped around and, every so often, pulled under. Flash floods were living things, fierce animals given temporary animation, but if I didn’t get to Jasmine before the power fueling this storm fell, then the heavens would fall with it, and the Tulpa would win all. There was little I could do for the city at large, but I could begin with the girl who’d started it all.

Put her, always, above yourself.

“Jasmine!” My voice echoed along the widened corridor, slipping along unlikely corners even the most sadistic of city planners wouldn’t have dreamed up. I was in the belly of the paranormal pipeline now, and though the rushing water would keep a mortal from hearing my call, I was hoping our shared chi would enable Jasmine to hear me, and give her enough strength to answer in return. I listened, but only heard the sky scream outside.

So I kept swimming, floating, and calling out, growing less hopeful the farther into the system I went. At one point I spotted one of the iron ladders drilled into the side of the sloping tunnel and stopped myself so the swollen water rushed past me. The waves were chest deep even in the largest pipes, and the current kept jerking my feet from beneath me as I tried to link them around the rungs. So when the mewling sound came, I barely heard it.

Until it reverberated in my chest.

“Jas!” I called out again, screaming this time, suddenly certain she was trying to reach out to me. Hadn’t she said on the rooftop of her house that she’d felt me drawing nearer? So why would it be any different now? The thought gave me an idea, and I inhaled deeply and submerged myself in the icy flood. I held, one-handed, to the ladder, listening…and heard it again.

It was coming from deeper in the pipeline, a different entrance, but closer to the core and Midheaven, as the Tulpa had said. I bobbed for air, inhaling a mouthful before giving in to the current and allowing myself to be sucked under again. Jasmine continued calling, the sound growing increasingly stronger. I was becoming used to the tumult of the waters, almost finding a rhythm to its twisting violence, and was so surprised by the sudden slamming of my body into a wall that I actually sucked in a mouthful of the gritty deluge. Flailing as the water continued to press me against the unyielding concrete, I fought to the surface, which proved even higher than I thought. However, once I managed it, I was rewarded.

“Jasmine,” I sputtered, and almost managed a smile.

“It hurts,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.

At first I thought she was talking about her restraints. The Tulpa had secured her with ropes that stretched the width of the tunnel, fastening on opposite ladder rungs. It didn’t look painful, however, and the rising water kept her body weight from pulling on the ties, so that couldn’t be it. Of course, when she cringed again, eyes squeezed shut, short dark hair plastered to her skull as she ducked her head, I realized she was reacting to something I couldn’t hear. Dolphin language, perhaps.

I looked up.

But her proximity to Midheaven was a more likely bet.

I willed my glyph to life, gaining my bearings in the meager light. I’d hit the rounded wall that marked the vertical entrance, and the ledge to Midheaven above. Perhaps mortals couldn’t stand to be this close to the entrance. I suspected the only reason Jasmine could manage it now was because of the power she shared with me.

“Okay, Jas. I’m going to get you out of here,” I said, going to work on one of the restraints. I latched one foot in a lower rung, as water continued to rage at the wall, rising swiftly. I had no idea where to take her once I did free her. To a broken world where the sky had caved in? Back to a family that might have been crushed under its weight? Certainly not to Midheaven. The passage alone would kill her, even if the way wasn’t locked.

As if on cue, a piercing wail sounded, almost directly through the walls.

So the sky was falling, the water rising-neck height now-Skamar was dying, Jasmine drowning…and I couldn’t get this damned knot untied!

So swim away, you idiot! I glanced up. Because I could. I could decamp to Midheaven again, disappear into another world, saving myself, escaping it all.

Catching my look, Jasmine smiled, bittersweet. “I wondered how long it would take you to think of it.”

I shook my head and went back to work. She winced in response to some sound I couldn’t hear, and I felt the shudder slide into me, as if our bodies had melded where they touched. “Don’t worry. I’m not-”

She cut me off. “I would.”

Surprised, I jolted and my foot slipped, sending me far enough underwater that I got another mouthful of the briny stuff. It was metallic and gritty, trace amounts of gasoline making pretty liquid rainbows off the heaving surface. I spit as I regained my feet and tried to lift Jasmine up. There was enough slack to have her half hidden in the hole leading to Midheaven-and put her always above yourself might mean literally, right?-but the higher we got, the worse it was for her. She screamed and the water rolling down her face was from tears, not the flood. But if I left her alone, she’d drown. I didn’t know which was the lesser of the evils. So I held her to me.

“I would,” she repeated against my chest.

“Shh.” I stroked her head, as something in the sky lost its riveting. The tunnels shook.

Jasmine gave up, relaxing against my chest. Water lapped at her lips. Her skin was clammy and cold, like she was already dead. Despite my best efforts to hold her up, the water was winning. She lifted her head in the air so she was staring straight up at me.

“You’re not going to get me undone in time. It’s okay. And…and I’m happy for Li. If I die, it’ll be better for her.” She bobbed, gurgled a bit, and I lifted her higher. Too high. She screamed in pain.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” I clasped her close again and suddenly tears were rolling down my face as well. I didn’t know what to do!

Jasmine coughed, spit out more water. “You should…go.”

“No. I won’t leave you.”

“Okay.” She shut her eyes. “Then stay with me for as long as possible, okay?”

“Yes,” I whispered, watching the water climb past her lips.

“It’s okay…” She bobbed, gurgled. “You said the first time sucked anyway.”

The reference to her virginity had me laying my cheek across her forehead. “Jasmine.”

She had fought becoming a woman because it meant letting go of the power afforded changelings, but I knew she’d longed for it too. All girls did, at once excited at the prospect and ambivalent at the unknown. That had been a long time ago for me. Before attacks and a metamorphosis, before superheroes and tulpas and tunnels leading to other worlds. I felt tears sliding down my cheeks, almost burning my skin in contrast to the water infiltrating every pore in icy jabs. I lifted Jas a bit higher. Not too high. Not so the proximity to Midheaven would cause her any more pain. She’d had enough of that.

Her head was pointed straight up now. Her ears were submerged.

“Stay with me…” she said again. Water again lapped at her lips.

“I’ll go under with you,” I whispered, because little girls shouldn’t have to die alone. Because when I was not much older than her, I’d been left to do just that. I smiled, then bent, and kissed her like I knew her mother would if she were there.

If the feeling that passed between us was visible, it would have been a hot spark, a welder’s fire, a burst like a comet shooting from my mouth into hers. Shocked, I pulled back, and she gasped, sucking in a lungful of the floodwaters.

Put her, always, above yourself.

And in the moment, when I really believed it was the last for both Jasmine and me-for Skamar and Las Vegas, and for Warren’s beloved troop-I had the strangest thought. I thought of Suzanne and her blabber about goddesses…and how she’d told me I wasn’t gray, but full of color. The life of the world. A fucking rainbow.

I thought of my mother, and how she’d once given her aura over to me, color blooming behind my closed eyes as she fed her soul into mine, her energy bleeding through and then beneath my skin. Of everything in this world, which oscillated with vibrational energy, lives were the most potent. A death, or birth-a sacrifice of one’s own soul-was a detonation that could change the world.

Put her always above yourself.

As my mother had done with me. She’d harnessed her personal energy and then drove it relentlessly into me. I smiled at the memory of power flowing from her mouth to mine.

There was a way to fix Jasmine’s shattered chi without killing her. A single choice that would give Skamar the power she needed to beat the Tulpa, to force the manuals of Light to be written again so that my allies had havens outside the sanctuary once more. To save this world. I laughed because it was suddenly all so clear and simple.

Jasmine’s eyes went wide as she realized what I was going to do, and as she opened her mouth-either to accept or protest, I wasn’t sure which-mine came down atop hers to mimic the way my mother had once settled upon mine. I shut my eyes and concentrated on transferring all the remaining aura in my body into hers. I gave it all up, and as it reunited in her body, I felt every ounce of power that had made me super, the Kairos, even the energy keeping me standing, fade away. I fed the entirety of my aura into Jasmine’s soul, reuniting the severed chi. As for my powers…well, they went somewhere. The Universe. Ether. I didn’t know. But even as I sagged with the loss, my senses dulled, I kept my lips fastened tight…and focusing on sending one final pulse of superpower arching from my body into Jasmine’s.

I’d been near death enough times to know I was experiencing it now. This time, though, was both the best and worst because I was choosing it, meeting it full on, playing chicken, but with no intention of dodging at the last minute. I simply gave myself over to it, a release like falling backward into a pool, though the feeling that the pool had moved-that it was farther away than I’d judged-was disorienting.

I felt the tunnel shake above and around me, and realized Jasmine was freeing herself with that final beat of power, ripping her restraints from the wall, her victorious cry sounding like it was coming from my own throat. There was a pounding like walls cracking. I heard the Tulpa screaming in the voice of a monster. It made me want to smile.

I was the Kairos-racing through the tunnels beneath my city, choosing my battles, putting a mortal life above-always above-mine, but the word didn’t only signify some preordained savior of the Zodiac. The kairotic moment was defined as the critical time to act. The abandonment of hesitation, the appointed time.

Fate, I thought, and I began, peacefully, to sink.

What’s one person?

Warren’s words, spoken so callously under a bulging sky at the entrance to the pipeline, were the first that I remembered when I woke.

In a ditch.

On the side of the road.

Alone.

And while it appeared I’d been left in the wake of a flood for some mortals to find, I tried not to give in to the feeling that I’d been thrown away, like refuse, for the second time in my life. After all, I thought as I rose to my knees, Warren wouldn’t just dump me anywhere. He always had it well planned out.

Squinting beneath a full blazing sun, I tried to stand and figure out where I was. The latter proved the easiest of the two tasks. I was in the Las Vegas Wash, the end point for all the debris and unwanted things that were pushed out of the city. But I was surprised when my knees buckled and I toppled forward in that wash, surprising myself again when I discovered my arms couldn’t hold my own weight. It was, I thought, with a sense of detachment, as if my muscles hadn’t been used all year.

Of course, the unyielding earth stopped my fall for me, and I rose again, more slowly this time, with a mouthful of mud, palms cut where they’d landed atop shattered glass. I knelt among choked weeds and stripped tires, slouched there for at least an hour. I stared at my palms the entire time, sunlight glinting off the cut glass in front of me, finally drying the blood that stained it-though I knew someone, somewhere, would still be able to smell it. But I was anosmic. My muscles were atrophied.

And my palms didn’t heal.

I reclined on the slope of one bank, head on a boulder, and decided to lay there just a bit longer. Maybe another hour, like I was sunning myself under that beautiful, sweeping blue sky. Just until some curious mortal came along, a homeless person, or maybe some kids looking to see what the storm had washed away. Someone who’d be wondering, as I was, if there was anything in the wash that could be salvaged.

Finally, I closed my eyes, giving the worry up to someone else’s keeping.