Morning Star

“Shit,” Holiday says. “I told you we didn’t have time.”

“We’re fine,” Trigg says.

We’re together in the elevator. Victra on the floor. Trigg, helping her into his black rain gear to give her a semblance of decency. My knuckles are white. Vixus’s blood trickles over the inscribed image of children playing in the tunnels. It drips over my parents and stains Eo’s hair red before I wipe it from the blade with my prisoner jumpsuit. I forgot how easy it is to take a life.

“Live for yourself, die alone,” Trigg says quietly. “You think with all those brains, they’d have sense enough not to be such assholes.” He looks over at me, brushing hair from flinty eyes. “Sorry to be a prick, sir. Y’know, if he was a friend…”

“Friend?” I shake my head. “He had no friends.”

I bend down to brush Victra’s hair from her face. She sleeps peacefully against the wall. Cheeks carved out from hunger. Lips thin and sad. There’s a dramatic beauty to her features even now. I wonder what they did to her. The poor woman, always so strong, so brash, but always to cover the kindness inside. I wonder if any is left.

“Are you prime?” Trigg asks. I don’t respond. “Was she your girl?”

“No,” I say. I touch the beard that’s grown on my face. I hate how it scratches and stinks. I wish Danto had shaved it off as well. “I’m not prime.”

I don’t feel hope. I don’t feel love.

Not as I look at what they did to Victra, to me.

It’s the hate that rides.

Hate too for what I’ve become. I feel Trigg’s eyes. Know he’s disappointed. He wanted the Reaper. And I’m just a withered husk of a man. I run my fingers against my cage of ribs. So many slender little things. I promised these Grays too much. I promised everyone too much, especially Victra. She was true to me. What was I to her but another person who wanted to use her? Another person her mother trained her to be prepared against.

“You know what we need?” Trigg asks.

I look up at him intensely. “Justice?”

“A cold beer.”

A laugh explodes out of my mouth. Too loud. Scaring me.

“Shit,” Holiday murmurs, hands flying over the controls. “Shit. Shit. Shit…”

“What?” I ask.

We’re stuck between the 24th and 25th. She punches buttons but suddenly the lift jerks upward. “They’ve overridden the controls. We’re not going to make it to the hangar. They’re redirecting us….” She lets out a long breath as she looks up at me. “To the first level. Shit. Shit. Shit. They’ll be waiting with lurchers, maybe Obsidians…maybe Golds.” She pauses. “They know you’re in here.”

I fight back the despair that rushes up from my belly. I won’t go back. Whatever happens. I’ll kill Victra, kill myself before I let them take us.

Trigg is hunched over his sister. “Can you hack the system?”

“When the hell do you think I learned how to do that?”

“I wish Ephraim was here. He could.”

“Well, I’m not Ephraim.”

“What about climbing out?”

“If you want to be a skid mark.”

“Guess that leaves one option. Eh?” He reaches into his pocket. “Plan C.”

“I hate Plan C.”

“Yeah, well. Time to embrace the suck, babydoll. Unpack the heathen.

“What’s Plan C?” I ask quietly.

“Escalation.” Trigg activates his comlink. Codes flash over his screen as he connects to a secure frequency. “Outrider to Wrathbone, do you register? Outrider to—”

“Wrathbone registers,” a ghostly voice echoes. “Request clearance code Echo. Over.”

Trigg references his datapad. “13439283. Over.”

“Code is green.”

“We need secondary extraction in five. Got the princess plus one at stage two.”

There’s a pause on the other line, the relief in the voice palpable even through the static. “Late notice.”

“Murder ain’t exactly punctual.”

“Be there in ten. Keep him alive.” The link goes dead.

“Goddamn amateurs,” Trigg mutters.

“Ten minutes,” Holiday repeats.

“We’ve been in worse shit.”

“When?” He doesn’t answer her. “Should have just gone to the goddamn hangar.”

“What can I do?” I ask, sensing their fear. “Can I help?”

“Don’t die,” Holiday says as she slides off her backpack. “Then this is all for shit.”

“You gotta drag your friend,” Trigg says as he starts picking tech off his body except his armor. He pulls two more antique weapons from his pack—two pistols to complement the high-powered gas ambi-rifle. He hands me a pistol. My hand shakes. I haven’t held a gunpowder weapon since I was sixteen training with the Sons. They’re vastly inefficient and heavy, and their recoil makes them wildly inaccurate.

Holiday pulls a large plastic box from her pack. Her fingers pause over the latches.

She opens the plastic box to reveal a metal cylinder with a spinning ball of mercury at its center. I stare at the device. If the Society caught her carrying it, she’d never see daylight again. Vastly illegal. I eye the gravLift’s display on the wall. Ten levels to go. Holiday grips a remote control for the cylinder. Eight levels.

Will Cassius be waiting? Aja? The Jackal? No. They would be on their ship, preparing for dinner. The Jackal would be living his life. They won’t know the alarm is for me. And even when they do, they’ll be delayed. But there’s enough to fear even without one of them coming. An Obsidian could rip these two apart with his bare hands. Trigg knows. He closes his eyes, touching his chest at four points to make a cross. A wedding band glints softly in the low light. Holiday minds the gesture, but doesn’t do the same.

“This is our profession,” she says quietly to me. “So swallow your pride. Stay behind us and let Trigg and I work.”

Trigg cracks his neck and kisses his gloved left ring finger. “Stay close. Nut to butt, sir. Don’t be shy.”

Three levels to go.

Holiday readies a gas rifle in her right hand and chews intensely on her gum, left thumb on the remote control. One level to go. We’re slowing. Watching the double doors. I loop Victra’s legs in my armpits.

“Love you, kiddo,” Holiday says.

“Love you too, babydoll,” Trigg murmurs back, voice tight and mechanical now.

I feel more afraid than I did when I lay encased in a starShell in the chamber of a spitTube before my rain. Not just afraid for me, but for Victra, for these two siblings. I want them to live. I want to know about South Pacifica. I want to know what pranks they pulled on their mother. If they had a dog, a home in the city, the country…

The gravLift wheezes to a halt.

The door light flashes. And the thick metal doors that separate us from a platoon of the Jackal’s elite hiss open. Two glowing stunGrenades zip in and clamp to the walls. Beep. Beep. And Holiday pushes the device’s button. A deep implosion of sound ruptures the elevator’s quiet as an invisible electromagnetic pulse ripples out from the spherical EMP at our feet. The grenades fizzle dead. Lights go black in the elevator, outside it. And all the Grays waiting beyond the door with their hi-tech pulse weapons, and all the Obsidians in their heavy armor with their electronic joints and helmets and air filtration units, are slapped in the face with the Middle Ages.

But Holiday and Trigg’s antiques still work. They stalk forward out of the elevator into the stone hall, hunched over their weapons like evil gargoyles. It’s slaughter. Two expert marksmen firing short bursts of archaic slugs at point-blank range into squads of defenseless Grays in wide halls. There is no cover to take. Flashes in the corridor. Gigantic sounds of high-powered rifles. Rattling my teeth. I freeze in the elevator till Holiday shouts at me, and I rush after Trigg, hauling Victra behind me.

Three Obsidians go down as Holiday lobs an antique grenade. Whooomph. A hole opens in the ceiling. Plaster rains. Dust. Chairs and Coppers fall through the hole from the room above, crashing down into the fray. I hyperventilate. A man’s head kicks back. Body spins to the ground. A Gray flees for cover down a stone hall. Holiday shoots her in the spine. She sprawls like a child slipping on ice. Movement everywhere. An Obsidian charges from the side.

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.