Adamant (33 page)

I ran to her, although I already knew she was dead. The roaring in my ears was painful now, more like screaming.

And then I became aware of real voices. Behind me.

“What a shame,” someone remarked. “I liked her.”

Five strangers had come out of the Passages. All wore magicproof suits like the guys I’d killed on Valeria. One was a teenager with spiked hair. The other three were clearly related. A blond girl followed behind.

And between them was a smaller, redheaded figure with eyes like white orbs, dark pupils in the centre.

Ada.

***

ADA

Delta’s father was the spitting image of Josef, except his face was more lined and his hair streaked with grey. Unremarkable, anyway. But then, killers weren’t recognisable at a glance, and nor were murdering psychotic businessmen.

“Here we are,” he said. “Central. And we’re just in time.” He laid a hand on my back and pushed me out of the Passages, into the street.

The magic hit me first. It slammed into me with the strength of a boulder, making me sway on the spot. My vision was off-kilter, like I saw the world through distorted glass. Magic pulsed like something living, a cloud covering the houses with their shattered windowpanes, the wrecked cars, the person standing stock-still in the middle of the road—no, now they were running towards a prone body a few feet away.

Oh, God, Kay.
And the body was Skyla’s. I wasn’t sorry. I couldn’t afford to be. I needed to get the hell away from Delta and his lunatic family before they used me to blow up Central.

Janice skipped out of the Passages behind me. “What did I miss?” she asked.

“Looks like a magical battle,” Delta said. “Who is that?”

Kay. Get out of here. Please.

“No idea,” said Janice. “That’s the girl who used to visit, though, isn’t it?”

“Skyla,” said Delta. “Hell, I know who that guy is. Walker. He killed her.”

“What a shame,” said Josef. “I liked her.”

Like in slow motion, Kay turned. Looked into my real eyes.

His own widened in shock.

Get out. Please, Kay.

I couldn’t say a word. Not even as Delta’s father shoved me forward, his cousins pinning me on either side. Delta in front. He glanced back at his father. “Are we gonna mow him down, or what?”

“I’d stop there,” said Kay. My heart sank. Of course he’d challenge them.
Dammit, Kay.

“Walker, is it?” said Delta’s father.

“Kay, actually,” he answered.
Oh, for God’s sake, get out of here!

“I suppose he is a magic-wielder,” said Delta’s father. “And with Skyla dead, we could use the power.”

Where was everyone else? What had happened at Central? Delta’s father had walked through the battle in the Passages like a god through mortals, and no one had dared follow to challenge him. Not when they’d seen my eyes. Not when they’d seen the magic that surrounded me like a deadly cloak of white lightning. Kay could see it, too. But he’d sacrifice his own life before he let them get at Central.

They were going to use me to kill him.

Delta’s father leaned in behind me. He’d strapped a metal-plated contraption to my back. Didn’t take a genius to figure out it was a bomb. No—
I
was the bomb. And Kay was…

“Get out of here!” I screamed, cracking. “Save yourself! Please…”

Delta’s father backhanded me, knocking me sideways into one of the cousins. Kay swore and took a step forward. Not back. Not away. Oh, God.

“It’s pointless,” he said. “Central’s been evacuated, so’s this whole area. You really want to kill me that badly?”

Was he telling the truth? It was impossible to tell.

“Actually,” Delta’s father said, “We could use some leverage over Walker in case he comes back. Janice? Take him.”

“With pleasure,” said Janice, skipping forward. Kay watched her, and although he was dead still, I knew he was thinking hard.

“She’s a magic-wielder!” I shouted, earning another slap. I barely felt it. The static charge building inside my veins was unbearable, like it
had
to escape somehow, otherwise I’d burn to a crisp from the inside out. But that seemed a preferable fate to wiping out half London in a magical assault.

Janice attacked, but Kay was faster. He avoided the bolt of magic
and
the backlash and sent an equal force back—hell, he was using magic? But I was shaking hard, and my vision blurred more by the second.

“Stop this,” I said, through chattering teeth. “If this magic gets out, it’ll obliterate us along with everything else.”

“On the contrary,” said Delta’s father. “You will absorb the backlash yourself. Surely you knew the clue was in your name? Adamantine absorbs magic.”

Crap. It does. But that means Central does, too!

No one was in Central anymore.

“Ingenious, wasn’t it?” said Delta’s father. “To force the Alliance to leave the one safe place in the city. I doubt they got far enough not to be caught in the blast. We have time enough to watch the outcome of this, anyway.”

Kay had managed to pin Janice down, but by the tremors rocking the magic in the atmosphere, I could tell both were firing magic at one another. In seconds, one or other of them would be dead.

I ran forward, the movement disturbing the magic. I couldn’t intervene without blowing everything sky-high. But the slight disturbance had sent both of them head over heels—Kay slammed into the pavement, and my heart pitched as I saw his hands had taken the backlash and were burned raw red. Janice was in similar condition. Teeth bared in a feral snarl, she leaped at him.

On his feet in a second, Kay raised a hand. His dark eyes gleamed, the pupils disappearing, almost inhuman. And a fork of lightning shot at Janice. She couldn’t avoid it.

She fell.

“More’s the pity,” said Delta’s father, coldly. “Right. Come, now.” He pushed me forwards. The others moved, too.

“What about him?” Delta jerked his head at Kay, who still stood beside Janice’s body, unmoving. As he did, Kay seemed to come to life again. He turned back and strode towards us. Eyes no longer gleaming, but blank.

Delta’s father let out an impatient noise. “Subdue him,” he told Delta’s cousins. “She’s not going anywhere. Not if you threaten
him.
”

Dammit.

Josef and Gregor advanced on Kay. They actually looked a little frightened. But they had the advantage of the magicproof suits, and Kay was injured besides. A sharp pain pierced my chest as I saw his ruined hands. He didn’t seem to acknowledge it, but I knew it had to really hurt. My heart dipped further. Both cousins carried those magic-charged metal plates they’d used on me.

I couldn’t watch. But I did. It was over so fast—one second Kay had pulled a knife, though it must hurt like a bitch to hold it. Next he was disarmed, and Josef struck him over the head with the metal plate. Then he was on the ground, the antimagic shock vibrating through him. I
felt
it, the agony ripping open my own bones. The magic. I could feel the magic…

No. That was
anti
magic I could feel, like magic but its stark opposite. And I’d pulled on it, the same way I did with magic.

Antimagic. Adamantine. To block magic required a substance which had magic origins itself. The reverse reaction. I had more antimagic in my blood than they did in those ridiculous suits. My hands were free. They couldn’t have cuffed me, because that would have blocked me from unleashing the source. But that meant I could take in the magic myself. Absorb it.

Delta’s cousins whirled on me, staring. They’d felt it, too. And from the look on his father’s face, he’d also figured something was up. I couldn’t hear what he said. The charge had built up to unbearable levels. I could hear swearing—the world had broken into fragments—I blinked, but couldn’t clear the film from my vision. It pulsed black, then white, then black again. There was a cracking sound, like breaking metal. The bomb strapped to my back. It fragmented, the plates encasing the bomb breaking away…

I pulled all the magic, all the antimagic, towards me. Took it all in. They couldn’t use it anymore.

My knees struck concrete. Through the haze, I made out Delta and his father, and cousins, and they were shouting at each other. A meaningless jumble of words I couldn’t make sense of. Delta’s father barked something, and the two cousins turned and strode towards me. They looked scared, but had clearly been given an order.

I lifted my head, held up a hand and the magic gathered in my palm, pure white. Sparks shot out and the charged plates in their hands crumbled. Both cousins yelled as the charge went through them. Building higher. Level three.

They fell.

The charge rippled outwards. I could do nothing about the backlash, not when it rippled through the air and Delta dropped to the ground, when his father took one step towards me and fell, too, screaming…

Everything blurred.
Kay.
Where was he? I couldn’t see if he’d been hit.
No…

The backlash struck me. I cried out, every cell in my body screaming. The world blacked out. Lights burst behind my eyes.

Then… nothing.

THREE WEEKS LATER

KAY

“Dammit, Markos, I can open the bloody door.”

“I beg to differ,” said the centaur, and kicked the door to Ms Weston’s office in with one hoof. Rolling my eyes, I closed the door behind me and faced the boss.

Three weeks on, and I was still surprised I hadn’t been fired yet. It had taken a week for them to clean up Central—I’d actually been right when I’d told the Campbell boss the place had been evacuated. Not that it would have made a difference if he’d really been able to use Ada as a bomb.

London had had a lucky escape. So had the world.

“Kay,” said Ms Weston. “I see the bandages are off.”

I held up my barely scarred hands. “See? Back to normal. Nothing to stop me running patrols.” I was going stir-crazy, and Ms Weston knew it.

I already knew that magic burn didn’t leave marks. Not on the outside.

“I’ll let Carl be the judge of that,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I hear you want to bring that girl back in. The girl who caused all the trouble.”

That figured. I only had to casually mention it and it was around half Central. Inevitable consequence of being the one witness at Central to the standoff with the Campbell family. Like I needed any more attention.

“Yes,” I said. “I think she’d be an excellent employee.”

Not that I’d told her—or the council—
how,
exactly, she’d killed the Campbells. That she could absorb any magic, including antimagic, unlike anyone else on Earth. All anyone else knew was that she was a powerful magic-wielder thanks to the adamantine in her blood—and the Alliance had no way of knowing what that really meant. I’d been the only witness, and the last thing I wanted to do was spread word of Ada’s capabilities. Even Earth’s council might take advantage.

Ms Weston apparently thought the same applied to me. She hadn’t said a word about the experiments, and as far as everyone else was concerned, I was just a normal magic-wielder who’d taken advantage of the unusually high levels of magic on Earth to use it as a weapon. Not that it came from me, that it was part of me.

“She’s a liability,” said Ms Weston. “We came
this
close to losing control of the Balance—this close to total annihilation.”

Yeah. I reckoned Central was still in a state of shock. To say nothing of all the ordinary people who’d had be evacuated from central London. The Alliance had spent the best part of the past three weeks clearing up the aftermath. The remainder of the Campbell family had been imprisoned back on Valeria. Pity they didn’t go in for the death penalty there. Those bastards had almost destroyed the Multiverse.

“That may be,” I said, “but if anything like this happens again—like it or not, with magic, it’s always a possibility—then we might need her. Besides, I doubt all the Alliance’s guards could stop her from helping the Enzarian refugees.”

“Yes… about that. You’re very lucky the council was amenable.”

Lucky. As they were the only people to know exactly what had happened in the standoff with the Campbells—even if I hadn’t been able to give Ada’s side of the story—they listened. No one could deny the situation in the Empire needed looking into, especially after the information about the hidden shelters in London got out. The Alliance had got hold of the contact details of several other shelters like Ada’s family’s. The offworld-aid part of the negotiations department had taken care of that, thankfully, and without anyone getting arrested—hopefully, they might even be able to reopen as legal shelters. As for the offworld transition points, that was a matter for the Law Division, seeing as they involved doorways that were listed in the Alliance’s records as defunct. Plainly, someone had tampered with the records to enable the refugees to use doorways the Alliance didn’t know about, breaking about twenty laws in the process. But there was no denying they saved too many lives to count, and the New York Alliance’s team were negotiating whether to open their new Passage to level two, allowing refugees to get through to the shelter from the transition points—thanks to Simon. Arranging that was pretty much the only thing that had stopped me from going batshit insane stuck in the office all the time. And it was about the only thing I’d managed not to fuck up since arriving at Central.