The Empowered, page 69
“We need to get back to the Dark-Net pronto.” I said. Get inside the Dark-Net and the Fairy Road.
Alex nodded, head cocked, listening. “Less than half a mile to the east. Search pattern. They’re skirting the edge of the Reclamation Zone.” Alex had said it was just over two hundred miles from Sinop to Kerch. Not long for a Raptor jet.
I closed my eyes, focusing on my power. No new pattern of tingling, which meant there wasn’t another Empowered nearby. Not yet.
“We’ll be in the clear once we break to the south,” I said.
Alex looked at me. “Can’t be helped.”
“I’ll distract them,” Ella’s two projections said. Another one appeared beside them. Three. A fourth one materialized next to a column at the edge of the temple. The two new ones were dressed like the others, meaning they were also dressed exactly like me. Ella had gone all in with as many Mat-look-alikes as she could summon. She’d obviously gotten control back over her power, but four projections at once was pushing it. Knowing her, she had projections elsewhere. If that were the case, then she had to be on the brink of exhaustion.
“Wait,” I told the nearest projection. “Let’s move together. If you need to distract, you can always re-project yourself, or whatever it is you call it.”
“It’s not that easy,” the nearest Ella replied, nostrils flaring. “But, I’ll do my best.”
“All any of us can do,” Alex said.
Diplomatic as always.
We kept to the edge of the ruins.
The hissing jet roar grew louder.
Elevating.
I closed my eyes, reached out into the ground. This was going to hurt like a bitch, but I didn’t have a choice. We needed cover.
I sent my awareness down into the soil. I took a deep breath. “I need a boost,” I told Alex.
“What are you planning?” The Ellas asked me.
I took a long, slow gulp of humid air. “Screening us.” What I was about to do would make it obvious Empowered were here, but it was way better than being caught out in the open without any cover.
Alex took a deep breath to match mine, closed his eyes. The Raven’s jets roared even louder, closer now.
I gasped. Power surged through me like lightning. It felt like fifty thousand volts ran through every fiber of me. So much power.
I staggered, managed to keep from falling. Fuck. I unclenched my fingers. I pushed my special sense deep into the soil. There were no tree roots here. No seeds. I pushed deeper. There. Plants. They weren’t trees. I pushed deeper, until my awareness pushed against ancient root-like things deep in the soil to the south of us.
The node. Lightning exploded through me. I clenched my teeth. Shit.
There was a vast tangle of those ancient root-like things beneath the node, beneath the entrance to the Dark-Net. The Dark-Net loomed at the edge of my awareness, just out of reach of my special sense, like an iceberg’s bulk beneath a frigid sea. All around the node power vibrated and mingled with the power crackling through me. Like cool water from a deep mountain lake mingling with water from a burbling brook.
At the edge of the node, where the earth fell into a warp, there were acorns. Ancient ones. I pushed my power into those acorns. They were asleep. Dormant. No. They were dead.
I strained to find life inside the cold shells. They were acorns of ancient oaks, untold centuries old. Buried deep in the earth. A trickle of sweat ran down my back.
It was bone dry down where the acorns were.
“The jet, I see it. It’s seen us!” One of the Ella’s whispered frantically.
“Let her concentrate,” Alex said.
Their voices came from far away.
I strained harder. The acorns couldn’t be dead. There had to be life. Urgent words sounded nearby.
“They are—” one of the Ella’s started to say, but the last word faded away as I pushed my power deeper into the ancient seeds. A faint rustling in my mind.
The acorns weren’t dead after all. An idea came to me. I reached out with my power, seeking other plant life closer to the surface.
Weeds grew near the node. Some kind of thistles.
I stretched my power into the thistles and commanded them to grow like crazy. Sent them growing impossibly fast under the ground to the Black Sea, erupting into the water, and sucking at it. The salt was poison. But weeds could adapt. My brain raced. The power coursing through me made every fraction of a second feel like a day.
The world pressed against my skull like a mountain. I exhaled, and the mountain receded.
My muscles screamed.
I peered into the weeds, into their roots, and somehow, thanks to the power, saw a way to filter the salt from the water, and bring that fresh water down deep into the soil, carried by hundreds of roots until they reached the acorns. I commanded the roots to coil around the acorns, and pull them up, while slickening them with water, until the acorns were just feet beneath the soil. All of this happened in a handful of seconds. My body shook.
I took a shuddering, deep breath, a huge weight pressing against my chest. Was I having a heart attack?
The world had gone dark. My power blinded my eyes. But in my mind, I saw the acorns, and the potential for life inside them. It was true. Life lingered. Always.
I reached blindly ahead of me. Strong fingers clasped my arm.
Grounded me.
Alex. I breathed in his warm, welcoming scent. His musky strength.
My hands trembled but I pressed my power, like tiny droplet of water, with the actual water, into the acorn, and urged it to life, to open, to grow. I poured a torrent of power into the acorn, then its companion, and then more acorns.
Sent them erupting upwards. The ground shook.
My eyesight returned.
The world snapped back into place. Black clad figures dropped from the hovering Raptor jet only a hundred yards away. Turrets tracked toward us, and what looked like chain guns spun up.
The oaks exploded from the earth. Huge clods of dirt flew upwards as the trees grew into a tangled forest. I screamed but all that came out of my mouth was a quiet croak.
Chain guns fired, scything through tree branches. But the newly-born oaks didn’t scream in my skull. I re-grew their limbs, healed their shattered trunks.
Alex held me close. I pushed even harder and the trees dropped acorns, which I brought to life and grew, and new trees joined the forest, thickening it.
The chain guns stopping firing, cycling a moment longer on empty.
I sent tree shoots up around the black-clad figures, grappled the agents, and pinned them. More trees shot up around the hovering VTOL jet. Tendrils shot into the turbines. The oaks still didn’t scream. Flush with my power, they felt no pain.
The turbines high-pitched whine suddenly slowed to a groan and the jet plummeted to the ground.
Metal tore. Flames shot up. An instant later the night brightened as the Raven exploded.
“Oh my god,” the Ellas gasped. “They all must be dead.”
I was too exhausted to feel anything. I needed water in the worse way. My mouth felt so dry it burned. I licked cracked lips. Alex pressed a water flask to my lips. Cool water filled my mouth. I swallowed and blinked.
Fire blazed up against the night sky. The new oak forest steamed and glowed dimly, the trees themselves still blazing with the power I’d filled them with.
“We’d better go,” I mumbled.
Alex nodded, and helped me walk across the open ground, toward the edge of the rise and the Dark-Net node beyond.
We were going to pull it off.
From behind us, in the direction of the Reclamation Zone, a rage-filled challenge trumpeted.
The ground shook. Something huge lumbered toward us.
I turned.
A huge serpentine neck and a scaled head covered in bronze scales reared up into the moonlit sky. The scales glittered. Its mouth opened. There were ranks of huge, sword-like teeth inside.
“A dragon!” The Ellas screamed out the word together.
I could see no wings, but its huge humped back appeared over the temple roof.
We ran into the oak forest, squeezing between the tree trunks.
The dragon-thing trumpeted again. Another bellow roared from the direction of the burning jet, past the trees.
“What the hell are those things?” I gasped out the question as we ran.
“Dragons!” The two Ella projection’s eyes were wide. “Dragons are real.”
“An aberrant life form that resembles a dragon, for sure,” Alex said.
“Aberrant?!”
“The reclamation zone spawns all kinds of things.”
We squeezed between a close knot of trees, and down the sloping ground toward the node.
Behind us, the dragon things crashed into the trees. The oaks screamed in my mind.
A pair of deafening shrieks exploded around us. I slapped my hands against my ears, fighting to muffle the noise.
Alex, clutched his ears. One of the Ella’s lay on the ground. Another one fell against a tree trunk. An instant later they vanished.
The other two Ellas ran toward the nearest dragon-thing.
The dragon roared again.
My bones rang from the roar. The last two Ella projections had fallen. They vanished.
Alex slapped what looked like bullet shaped earplugs into his ears, then straightened up, pulled a second pair from his utility belt pouch, and pressed them into mine. The roar began to drop in intensity until I could bear it.
He squeezed my arm and smiled faintly.
I nodded. A million questions crowded in my head, but there was no time. We needed to haul ass in the worse way.
If we didn’t get away, it wouldn’t matter what those things were or why they were here.
Muffled crackling sounded in the direction of the dragon things. They must be battering a way through the oaks. The oaks yelled in terror. I sent power into them as Alex and I scrambled through the tangled forest, sent energy to regenerate them, heal, something I’d never done before.
I held one of Alex’s arms once we’d managed to get free of the oak trees. The shrieking had stopped. The node was just a couple dozen yards ahead of us. We sprinted down the slope. The sky lit up, and Alex and I suddenly cast shadows.
I looked over my shoulder as I ran. Flames outlined the oak wood.
The dragon things—I could just see their heads above the trees, spewing fire.
Shit.
It was like they’d come out of the pages of one of Ella and Ava’s fairy tale books. But there was something else about them, something familiar that I couldn’t remember right then.
It wouldn’t matter if we didn’t get the hell of out Dodge right then.
We reached the barrow, ducked inside.
The node waited behind a huge stone.
The stone was cold beneath my fingers as I ran my hands over them.
“Open sesame,” Alex said beside me.
“Funny.”
He grinned. “Worth a shot.”
My legs were blown. My heart still raced. I had a killer headache.
But Alex, damn the man. I grinned despite the dragon things spewing fire through the woods, and despite the fact that we were literally toast if we couldn’t get out of here.
I should be exhausted. My heart should have burst. But power filled me. I felt no fatigue.
I grabbed him and planted a big kiss on that gorgeous mouth of his.
He blinked. “Wow.”
“Me, too.” I pushed myself away, pushed my sense back into the trees, power pouring into them like a tidal wave, healing and changing the oaks.
The billowing smoke faded.
The oak trees had stopped burning. I’d managed to make their wood fire proof.
The dragon-things bellowed their frustration, then one lumbered left, the other right, heading around my oak wood.
There was no way I could summon more trees.
“Please, let us in,” I said to the stone.
It didn’t answer. The node remained shut.
I ran my fingers over it. Lichen grew on it, here and there. I reached into the lichen, sent what power I had left into it. “I need more power again, please,” I whispered to Alex.
He nodded, put a hand on my shoulder. Power surged into me. I took slow, deep belly breath, and as I breathed out, power spread from my fingertips into the lichen. It grew until it covered the stone.
“Open sesame,” I whispered. Please.
The stone opened and we stumbled inside and into the Dark-Net.
The stone closed behind us. The dragon things roared, and then were cut off.
We had gotten the hell out of Dodge.
4
Dawn lit the Amazon jungle when we stepped from the vine-covered obsidian gate. The jungle wasn’t a chorus in my head, it was a bunch of choruses, all singing their songs of life at the same time. The noise made my legs shake and buckle. I closed my eyes, and pulled my power back, sucking in a few lungs full of the rich air.
A hand squeezed my shoulder. “Are you okay?” Alex asked.
I exhaled slowly. The chorus faded from overwhelming to a dull roar. Our return trip through the Dark-Net had taken us on a winding trail through huge coral-like growths. The ground had trembled constantly, but the coral-like things had only murmured gently in my mind.
Our walk seemed to have lasted only an hour, but with the dreamlike weird of the Dark-Net, it was always hard to tell. We’d walked in silence, arms around each other’s shoulders, the touch meaning more than words, right then.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” My voice was a croak. “Urgh, my throat is dry.” Alex handed me his canteen, and I took a long swallow. “Thanks.”
I looked around the little clearing. The node here in the Amazon blended into the jungle. It was almost completely overgrown with vines and flowers, only bits of the obsidian arched gate showed.
How long had we been gone? We’d left the Amazon at dusk and arrived in Kerch at night. Now it was dawn. But dawn of the next day, or weeks later?
“Those dragon things back in Kerch.” I remembered the scaled heads, rows of sword-like teeth, spewing fire. I shook my head. “You say they came from the Crimean Reclamation Zone. Did they just happen by when we broke into the station?” It seemed way too coincidental. “Two of them, working together, too. What gives?”
Suddenly, after not talking while walking the Fairy Road, I was running off at the mouth. My heart pounded.
Alex watched me, keeping his mouth shut, until I took a breath.
“There are creatures in the Reclamation Zone that people might call monsters.” He shook his head. His eyes narrowed. “But those ‘dragon-things,’ as you call them, those are a whole different order of monster. I don’t know where they came from.”
“Some kind of guard dog?” I muttered.
He rubbed his chin. “It seems like it, doesn’t it?” He put his hands on his hips, stared up at the tree tops a hundred feet above us. “The thing is, Support never tried to control those monsters.”
“What about the Hero Council?” I asked. A brilliantly colored butterfly landed on a flowering vine which draped over other vines which hid the ancient gate. I opened up my power just enough to reach the vine. The flower chirped happily in my head, while the vine itself trembled.
“Not possible,” Alex replied. “We would have known about it.”
I frowned. “How can you be so sure? Support loves secrets.”
“Because the Hero Council doesn’t do anything without Support knowing about it.”
“You can’t tell me that the higher ups in Support don’t hide things. What about the secrecy faction?”
He shrugged. “You have me there. Still, I’ve never heard of the creatures in the RZ’s being controlled like that. And these dragon-things are far larger than any of the other creatures listed in Support’s archives. Where did they come from?”
“The hell if I know,” I said. Alex and I stood in that little clearing and stared at each other.
“Where does that leave us?” he asked.
“Back where we started,” I deadpanned. “Clueless.”
“Hah. That the best you can do, Brandt?”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
His eyes widened.
“Gotcha.” I grinned.
“Didn’t think you were the tongue sticking out sort of girl.”
I looked at him sideways. “There’s lots you don’t know about me.”
“I’d like to find out.” He stepped closer.
Vines and leaves rustled nearby. We whirled around.
One of Ella’s projections slipped into the clearing, dressed in her favorite outfit, a gray Empowered costume, something out of the last century, with a black mask.
“Did I interrupt your love time?” she teased.
My cheeks flared. Alex shuffled his feet.
I swallowed. I asked the question that had been lurking in the back of my mind since we arrived back here. “How long has it been since I saw you last, here?”
“Two days.”
Two days. Damn. But, still it could have been a lot worse. Ever since it had taken Alex and I six months to get to Persia on the Fairy Road, I’d worried that the next time we traveled in the Dark-Net, it would last that long. It hadn’t yet. We’d been scooting back and forth. The Dark-Net had saved our lives more times than I could count. Without it, our little band of Empowered and Imbued would been imprisoned or dead. So, an extra day or two wasn’t a huge deal. Not mostly, at any rate.
She blinked and rubbed at her eyes.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“I’m having trouble focusing. I didn’t sleep at all last night. Losing those two projections hurt.” Her face twitched. She rubbed at her eye again. “Was worried about you, too. We didn’t know if you and Alex had made it out alive. I couldn’t locate you. I thought you might be dead.”
