City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World) (7 page)

“It’s true.” Spark’s huge eyes were a few shades lighter than her sister’s, soft jade rather than brilliant emerald, and they glinted with a cheer at odds with Copper’s stern demeanor. “Even Copper and I never meant to be here.”

“What happened? If you can tell me.”

“It’s no secret.” She sighed. “We were trying to get out of Tala. Took the tubes. This was just meant to be a stopover. As long as we were passing through—I had a couple friends at the university. Researchers I’d corresponded with over the years.

“Turns out, we were right to get out of Tala, but wrong to have delayed. We were still here when those
things
invaded and the tube system got shut down.”

Shut down
was putting it mildly. Every city and town with the resources to do it had collapsed any tunnel that led outside their boundaries. No one wanted the infestation that had destroyed the gods’ own city to spread. That was when we’d lost our communication with the outside as well. The cables that connected us had been in those tunnels too.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No need to apologize. Our story isn’t any sadder than others, and better than most.”

“Except for the part about the Jansynians hunting you,” I pointed out.

“And you’re going to fix that for us, so everything’s fine,” Spark answered cheerily.

We reached the car, where Vivian waited with the door held open. “Glad to have you with us, Spark. Step inside and we’ll have you to your hidey-hole in a few.”

Spark and I got in the back. Vogg entered last, carefully tucking his tail away from the door. Vivian joined Josiah in the front. Micah caught my eye and gave me a sincere “Good luck,” as he closed us in.

The warehouse outer door opened. Josiah backed us out and we were on the street again. Step one accomplished. Now for the rest.

#

We had no choice but to drive under the Crescent to get back to our own side of town. I’ll confess—every one of us in the car looked up and held our breath as we did so.
 

I couldn’t bear the tense silence. “Why?” I asked Spark. “Why are they after you?”

“Because they are thieves,” Vogg’s deep voice rumbled.

Spark shook her head, making her antennae wave. “It’s not like that. Not this time.”

“This time?” Vivian turned around in her seat. “You’ve dealt with them before?”

Spark pursed her thin lips and looked away. “It’s the way of things. It’s how our lives have always been. The simple truth is there’s no such thing as Jansynian innovation. They are as their god made them: brilliant, but lacking any true creativity. They hate my people for being the creators they can never be.

“And normally it doesn’t matter.” She addressed the words to Vogg, sincerity in her voice. “It
really
doesn’t matter. There are more of them, and they’re everywhere, and they have so much money and so many resources—it makes better sense for them to take our ideas and figure out how to distribute them. Manufacture, finance,” Spark rolled her eyes. “Boring. There’s not a one of my people who wants to spend their life worrying about those things. And it frees us up to move on to the next idea, which is never a hardship.”

She twisted around in her seat to look at the glittering lights of the Crescent, now shrinking behind us. “Except this time, it wasn’t a game. This time, we couldn’t afford to wait the usual time it takes for things to go through the Jansynian research and development process.”

Vogg crossed his arms, disapproving, which had the result of digging one of his elbow spikes into my ribs. It hurt. He didn’t seem to notice. I squeezed a little closer to Spark. “Copper said you could make it rain.”
 

That got Vivian and Josiah’s attention. I guess Amelia hadn’t filled them in on the details. Josiah looked around, although he quickly returned his focus to the road. Vivian straight-out stared. Spark squirmed under everyone’s gaze. “I’d had the idea early, not long after we got stuck here. I’d worked out the math and drawn some designs. And at first, right after they stole it, I thought maybe it was for the best. It’s not like Copper and I had the resources to build an orbital network.”

“A what?” Vivian asked.

Spark brightened even more at the chance to talk about her idea. “It occurred to me—and I can’t be the only one—but after the Abandon, well, there’s all this sky. Sure, we couldn’t do anything with it
before
, but Ouliria’s gone. If she won’t make it rain anymore, then she probably won’t be swatting things out of the sky anymore either. There’s a lot we could do from above that we could never manage from below. And one of those things…” she paused and flashed us a wide grin. “I think we could make it rain.”

Vivian had turned all the way around, sitting on her knees in the front, although it was too dark to make out her face. “And they stole that from you. The way to make it rain?”

“Yes. And at first it was fine. They were working on it. It’s not like you can hide tests when you have to launch them into space. It looked like they were moving forward as fast as I could hope. And why not? They’re not as desperate as the rest of the city, but it isn’t in their best interest to watch Miroc wither away to nothing.

“Except time passed and nothing happened. I knew they had the satellites up there, but they weren’t moving forward anymore. I couldn’t exactly ask them what happened, so Copper and I decided to go a different route. We took the plans for the system to the city council.”

Vivian started at mention of the city council. In the dark, I almost didn’t see it. And I had no idea what caused it. But I knew better than to ask in front of clients.
 

“That was when the trouble started,” Spark continued. “When the Jansynians came after me. They must have found out, and didn’t want the competition.”

“We know they have spies on the city council,” Vivian said. Which was news to me. Although hardly shocking.

Spark didn’t seem surprised either. “I didn’t think it would matter. They never used to attack us like that.”

A lot of things in this world never used to happen. But now the referees were absent, the watchful parents who made sure all their children played nice.

Or mostly nice. History held plenty of conflict—from small territorial disputes to all-out wars, but while a number of those had resolved themselves naturally, just as many had ended with the direct intervention of one of the Thirteen. And numerous others had never begun because one church or another had simply forbidden it.

The Abandon had broken the world, and now who was going to save it? After people had risen up against the churches, after the madness and fear that led to the riots had spent, had any new leadership stepped in? Had anyone tried to rebuild?
 

Not here in Miroc. Maybe not anywhere. We were all still waiting, hoping we’d wake up one morning and everything would be back the way it had been.
 

Vivian had fallen silent and I looked up to see her staring out the back window, frowning. “Jo….”

“Yeah, I know.”

I craned my head around, but couldn’t see anything wrong in the street behind us. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re being followed.”

I heard the click of Vivian readying her gun. “What do you think?”

“They’re faster and better armed than us.” Josiah sounded remarkably calm. I twisted around in my seat and caught sight of the Jansynian hovercar skirting the shadows behind us. Stalking us, waiting for the moment to move in.
 

Vivian had also taken on a cool focus. “Around the next corner, slow down enough I can jump out. I’ll get their attention, try to catch them in a crossfire.”

“Is that a good idea?” I asked. She’d be exposed, vulnerable.

“Not really,” Vivian said, “but our options are pretty much violence or violence. And better if they’re shooting at me than the car.”

It sounded like suicide to me, but what better solution could I offer? I’m not Iris. Complex magic on the fly is beyond me, too dangerous to contemplate. So what could I do that was simple?
 

“Vivian, wait. I’ve got a better plan.”

I twisted around in my seat. “I need a good look at them, and we’ll need to be going faster.”

Josiah didn’t hesitate. He yanked on the wheel and our tires screeched as the car spun. Josiah drove straight at the moving shadow, three blocks back, as the car picked up speed.
 

As we got closer, our headlights revealed four Jansynians, armed to the teeth, in a sleek black vehicle. The driver’s startled eyes reflecting back the glare. I fixed the look of the hovercar in my mind as it banked in the air to follow us.
 

Now came the harder part. I closed my eyes and envisioned a link between the front of our car and theirs. The image had to be solid. It had to be sure. I had to focus on the reality I was trying to create, not the screeching tires or painful weight of armored lizard that kept falling into me as Josiah slalomed the car through the late-night city streets.

“Ash!” Vivian snapped. “If you’re going to do something, do it.”

I opened my eyes, grabbed at my bag, and pulled out my NetPad. I couldn’t do this all in my head. I opened up the sketch program, but the motion of the car turned all my attempts to draw into jagged squiggles.
 

An explosion rang sharp outside the car. “Any time, Ash.” Vivian pointed her own gun out the window. I could see now the Jansynians were shooting at us.

I slid down to the floor. Scrunched between Vogg’s and Spark’s legs with the NetPad pressed against the seat was as much stability as I could manage. I traced out the sigils I needed. Energy. Motion. Distance. Unity. Over and over in a rough circle. They weren’t perfect, but they would have to do.
 

I blocked out the explosions. The jostling. The fear. In my mind, I retrieved the images of the two cars and to it I added this ring of symbols. I dropped the one over the other, and willed them to merge.

The effect was immediate. We stopped. Not a hard brake that threw us all forward, but an immediate absence of forward momentum. At the same time, the explosive crash behind us told me my pattern had worked just like I’d hoped. It was like we’d run head-on into their car, except we got to skip the part where our own vehicle became a smashed pile of flaming wreckage.

Josiah wasted no time getting the car moving again and we sped away from the crash.
 

#

After some time spent driving mazes through the city to make sure we had no further tails. I felt a little shaky once I didn’t have to cling to the calm focus for magic, once I had time to think about what I’d just done.

We made it to the rendezvous point without further incident. Iris was on the ground, waiting. Spark and Vogg and I got out as quickly as possible, and I waved to Josiah as he sped the car away. We hastened to the safehouse.

Viktor stood outside, as before, and he nodded to Iris. “Everything’s ready.”

“Ash, would you take Spark and Vogg inside while I talk to Vik?” Iris asked.

I was happy to oblige. I didn’t feel steady and my heart was still racing. I wasn’t eager to look weak in front of the men with the guns.

Vogg paid close attention to all the building’s occupants, but I couldn’t read either approval or disapproval on his stoic face. Only the occasional flutter of his ear-flaps communicated any emotion, but I had no idea what it was.

Spark’s temporary living quarters had gained some dishes and blankets in the hours since I’d seen it, but it still couldn’t pull off welcoming. She sat down at the table as Vogg took her bags into one bedroom and his one bag into the other.

Just to be safe, I did another check for listening devices or other Jansynian unpleasantness. The house was still secure. We’d done it.

I took the chair across the table from Spark, happy to have a quiet moment. Vogg joined us, kneeling next to the table, since we’d run out of chairs. Even so, his head was higher than Spark’s. “So now we wait.”

Spark rested her tiny hand over his large, armored one, but she addressed me. “Do you have a plan for what’s next?”

Amelia hadn’t given me any instructions on how much to tell Spark. I hoped I wasn’t doing the wrong thing, being honest. “We haven’t had a chance to discuss the next steps yet. I had a contact inside one of the Jansynian corporations, but I’ve lost touch with her and I’m not sure how to find her. Although I’m going to try. And I’m sure Amelia has plans for other routes of investigation. We’re going to do our best to give them a better option than assassination.”

I’d worried they might take my past involvements with Jansynians the wrong way. It wouldn’t have been a bit unreasonable for them to be suspicious of anyone who had friends or former friends up in the Crescent.

Neither Spark nor Vogg looked upset by this information. Spark even smiled at me. “That would be extraordinary. Thank you. I told Copper she was wrong about you.”

“Wrong? What did she say?”

Spark’s voice was a mix of fondness and exasperation. “Copper, she thinks she knows everything. Just because she’s older…” Spark sighed. “We had one of your people—a priest of Kaifail who would pass through my home town when I was a girl. A sweet old woman, full of stories. My mother always said you could trust Kaifail’s priests with the children, but not with the blueprints, if you get what I’m saying.”

“No,” I answered honestly.
 

Spark waggled one overlong finger at me, in obvious imitation of her mother. “Storytellers and dreamers,” she said, her voice low and serious. She smiled and was herself again. “Mother never trusted anyone who didn’t work with their hands. And Copper takes after her.”

“I’m not sure your mother was wrong,” I conceded. “Once. But these days—”

Iris popped her head in the door. “C’mon, Ash. Time to go.”

I stood. “Will you be okay?” I asked Spark.

“That’s the hope, isn’t it?” She smiled at me. “Stay safe, Ash. And thank you.”

#

Kaifail was a wanderer. He loved this world and all the creatures in it. He travelled all over, always in disguise. As one of his own priests, as an old man in need, as a kid discovering freedom on the road. Always, he told stories.