9

The Darkness

The energy blossoms outward from the Stained, liquid to the eye, evaporating his body and spreading over the floor like spilled mercury before darkening, slipping back to the origin, sucking men and chairs and bottles toward it like a black hole before detonating with a deep, nightmare roar. I snag the Jackal up by his jacket and fly through the wall, slamming shoulder first as, behind us, glass, wood, metal, eardrums, and men rupture.

My boots fail. We fly across the street and slam into the building opposite, cracking concrete and falling to the ground as the Lost Wee Den shrinks inward like a grape becoming a raisin becoming dust. She exhales a death rattle of fire and ash before sagging to ruin.

Beneath me, the Jackal’s unconscious, his legs badly burned. I vomit as I try to stand, my skeleton creaking like the trunk of a young tree after its first hard winter wind. I stumble up only to fall back to the ground, emptying my stomach a second time. Pain in my skull. Nose dripping blood. Ears trickling with it. Eyeballs throbbing from the explosion. Shoulder dislocated. I gain my knees, wedge my shoulder against the wall and roll the joint back in, quivering out breath as it pops into place. The feeling of needles tickles my fingers. I wipe the sick off my hands and wobble finally to my feet. I pick up the Jackal and squint into the smoke.

I hear nothing but the wailing of stereocilia. Like screaming sparrows in my inner ear, throbbing. I shake away the lights that dance across my vision. Smoke swallows me. People flow past, water around a rock, rushing to help those trapped. They’ll find only death, only ash. Sonic booms puncture the night. The Jackal’s support teams roar down from the city above. And as they land to take him out of this hell, the sparrows in my ears fade, devoured by the crackling of flames and the crying of the wounded.

I stand in front of an abandoned factory, four hundred kilometers from the Citadel, deep in the Old Industrial Sector. Newer factories have been built atop this one, burying it beneath a fresh skin of industry like a deep blackhead. Grime skins the place. Carnivorous moss. Rust-filled water. I’d have thought it a dead end if I didn’t know my quarry so well.

The datapad I took from the Red survived the explosion. I left the Jackal for his support teams and slipped further down the street, where I stole a Gray police craft. After wiping the datapad’s tracking device, I hacked into the datapad coordinates history.

I knock hard on the locked door to the factory’s main level. Nothing. They must be shitting themselves. So I kneel on the ground, hands behind my head, and wait. After a few minutes, the door creaks open. Darkness inside. Then several figures slip forward. They bind my hands, cover my head with a bag, and push me into the factory.

After taking me down an old hydraulic elevator, they guide me steadily toward the sound of music. Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 2, if I am correct. Computers hum. Welding torches flare bright enough to glow through the bag’s fabric.

“Here, get off him, you brutes,” snaps a familiar voice.

“Careful, clown,” rumbles some Red.

“Babble at me all you want, you rusty baboon, he’s worth more than ten thousand of you inbred rough—”

“Dalo, get out,” Evey says softly. “Now.”

Boots thud away. “Can I stop pretending now?” I ask.

“By all means,” Mickey says.

I snap the cuffs they bound my wrists with behind my back, and strip off the bag that covers my head. The concrete and metal laboratory is clean, quiet but for the soothing music. A faint haze floats in the air from Mickey’s water pipe in the corner. I tower over him and Evey. She can’t contain herself.

No longer the seductress Rose from the tavern, she throws herself into me like a little girl greeting a long-lost uncle. Her hands linger on my waist as she eventually pulls back and stares up into my Gold eyes with her pink ones. Despite her giggling, she’s all sensuality and beauty, with willowy arms and a slow, intimate smile that echoes none of the grief killing nearly two hundred people should mark her with. The winged girl has become a carrion bird and she doesn’t seem to have noticed. I wonder if she’d smile so broadly if she had to kill all those people with a knife. How easy we make mass murder.

“I could recognize you anywhere,” she says. “When I saw you at the table … my heart skipped a beat. Especially in that ridiculous Obsidian makeup. Darrow, what’s wrong?”

She yelps when I pick her up by the front of her jacket and shove her against the wall.

“You just killed two hundred people.” I shake my head, sore and heavy with the weight of what’s happened. “How could you, Evey?” I shake her, seeing again the crew of my ship venting into space. Seeing all the dead I’ve left in my path. Feeling Julian’s pulse fade to nothing.

“Darrow, darling—” Mickey tries.

“Shut up, Mickey.”

“Yes. All right.”

“Reds. Pinks. LowColors. Your own people. Like they were nothing.” My hands tremble.

“I was following orders, Darrow,” she says. “Adrius has been investigating us. He had to be taken out.”

So with all his scheming, he’d been noticed. Tears brim in Evey’s eyes. I don’t recoil from them. Who gives a shit about how she feels after what she’s just done? But I release her, letting her slide pathetically down the wall, hoping she might show some glimmer of regret that would make me think those tears are for the people she killed and not for herself, not because she’s scared of me.

“This isn’t how I wanted it to be,” she says, wiping her eyes. “When you saw me again.”

I stare down at her, confused. “What happened to you?

“She had a different teacher than you,” Mickey says. “I took her wings off and Harmony gave her claws.”

I turn to Mickey. “What the hell is going on?”

“It would take a year to explain.” He crosses his arms and examines me. “But let us first say, you’ve been missed, my darling prince. Second, please do not link my morality to that lost soul. I agree. Evey is a little monster.” He glares past me at Evey as she stands. “Maybe now you’ll see yourself for what you are.” His sneer fades, quick eyes scanning me toe to head. “Third, you look divine, my boy. Absolutely divine.”

His eyes dance over my face. His mouth opens, closes, tripping over itself it has so much to say. Sharp of face, oily of hair, he slides forward like a blade on ice. All angles. Skin wrapped around slender bones. Was he so thin when last I saw him? Or does he simply not have his cosmetics? No. His blinks are slow. Languid. He’s tired. Older. And seemingly beaten down. A queer air of vulnerability in the way his shoulders hunch and his eyes dart around, as if expecting to be hit at any moment.