Tether (33 page)

We passed a set of swinging double doors that looked like they might belong to a kitchen. The sudden sound of glass breaking made us all jump, and Callum, who had been going through the hallways with his finger resting on the trigger, accidentally pulled it in alarm and embedded a bullet in one of the doors.

“Shit,” Adele muttered under her breath. None of us moved, waiting to see if someone would come marching out of the kitchen to see who was there. Adele turned on Callum, incensed. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Hand it over.” She thrust her palm out, and Callum gave her the gun, still shaking from having fired it. He rubbed his shoulder and grimaced in pain.

“Whose idea was it to give the little prince a gun?” Adele glared at Selene and me.

“Hey!” Callum hissed. “Don’t call me that.”

The sound of more breaking glass reached our ears, and then an unintelligible shout. Selene’s head snapped up.

“That’s Juliana,” she said. Adele glanced at me, and I nodded to confirm. I’d heard her, too, in my head. It wasn’t a word or an image, just an amorphous, frightened burst of emotion, a flare of red at the base of my skull. “She’s in there.”

“Okay,” Adele whispered, clutching a gun in each hand and crouching just outside the double doors. “On the count of three, we’re going in. You two fire up whatever the hell kind
of freaky power you’ve got going on, and Prince Callum, you stay back as far as you can.”

Callum was uncertain. “What if it’s a trap? What if they’re trying to draw us in there just to make it easier to pick us off one by one? If that room really is a kitchen, there’ll be knives and glass everywhere. It’s like a murder factory.”

“If you’re scared, you can stay out here,” Adele said.

“I’m not—forget it. You’re not leaving me behind,” he said.

“It probably is a trap,” Adele told him. “But we don’t have a choice. Don’t worry, I won’t let you die.”

“Thanks,” he said, rolling his eyes. I put a hand on his arm and gave him the warmest, most hopeful smile I could.

“We’re going to be fine,” I told him.

“I’m sure that’s true,” Callum said, with more certainty than he probably felt. But he always was an optimist.

“Okay, people—one, two, three!” Adele said in a voice just below a whisper.

Hearts racing, we burst through the doors, the tether swinging and thrumming with the force of a high-velocity wind.

The door was closed. The light was gone. Bodies littered the ground near Thomas’s feet. The tranquilizer gun he’d snuck into the club taped
very
snugly against the inside of his upper thigh had done its job, but he’d emptied two clips bringing the Libertines to their quiet rest, and he was out of ammo. He had a handgun jammed into the belt of his jeans; he took it out, standing silent and still, daring someone to come at him and force his hand, but no one came.

His head was bleeding from a three-inch gash near his hairline, and two fingers on his right hand were probably broken; his nose was most definitely so. He wiped his mouth and drew his hand away covered in black liquid. It tasted like metal on his tongue. There were claw marks on his neck where a Libertine’s fingernails had punctured the skin in places, his wrist was sore, his head was pounding like a jackhammer, but he was alive. He could work with alive.

“Mayhew?” The voice, which belonged to Navin, came through the comm. Thomas found him moments later, slumped against the altar, clutching his upper arm. The moon, which had been hiding behind a thick blanket of clouds the entire
night, finally shone through the windows, and Thomas could see that Navin was bleeding.

“Is it bad?” Thomas asked, kneeling beside his friend.

“Just—grazed—me,” Navin lied, a full-body shiver slicing his words up with pauses. Thomas ripped the T-shirt off the nearest unconscious Libertine and wrapped it around Navin’s wounded arm, hoping to staunch the flow of blood until he could seek medical attention—although that might be hard to find for a KES agent in the Tattered City. But one problem at a time. Navin couldn’t stay at Martyr. If he was going to live, he had to leave.

Thomas helped the agent to his feet and turned him in the direction of the front door. The ruined church was empty now except for the victims of the blast—ten or twelve, civilians mostly, though Thomas saw one or two commandos sprawled there, too—and the casualties of the fight between the KES and Libertas. Thomas searched the blank faces of the dead for someone he knew and found Cora’s bloody face half covered by a fallen tapestry. His gut turned inside out at the sight of her. Her eyes were open, blank and unseeing, and there was a dark spot right in the center of her abdomen. Navin groaned and slipped a little, sliding down the side of the altar; Thomas turned his attention back to him, clutching him under the arms to prop him up.

“I can’t help you out,” Thomas told him, thinking of Sasha and the others who were missing. They must’ve gone down below; he had to follow them.

“Leave me,” Navin insisted. “I can’t walk. I can barely stand. I think my ankle’s broken, or sprained, or”—he sucked in a labored breath—“something.”

“No,” Thomas said. “You need to get to Tim. He can help you, find someone to patch you up, but you have to get to him.”

“Can’t, boss,” Navin said with a tight, grim smile. “No chance in hell.”

“I’ll get you out.” Thomas and Navin turned in the direction of the voice and saw a very battered Sergei, stumbling like a drunken dragonfly but managing to stay upright. He had a gun in his hand, but he dropped it, letting it clatter to the ground. “Clip’s empty.”

Thomas reached over and plucked a replacement from the shoulder holster of one of the Libertas guards. Weapons were plentiful now. He tossed it to Sergei, who caught it with one hand; the other was plainly broken, perhaps all the way up to the elbow. Sergei’s face was calm and expressionless; he was in shock. How was Tim going to handle two people who might die before he could get them to help? Thomas knew he ought to go with them, but he couldn’t abandon the rest of his team. When they had Juliana, he would send Adele and Rocko back to help Tim. Yes, that was what he would do. It was as good a plan as any, under the circumstances.

Cora,
he thought.
God, Cora.
But there wasn’t time to grieve.

“All right, then get going,” Thomas said. He hoisted Navin off the ground and propped him up on Sergei’s good shoulder, then watched his two friends limp in the direction of the front door, hoping against hope they wouldn’t be gunned down by any remaining Libertines outside the entrance, knowing they had no other option. When they were out of sight, he turned back to the door, checked his gun, and walked through.

Left or right? Which way would they have gone? He couldn’t decide, didn’t know the answer. For the first time tonight, he felt both helpless and alone. So many people he cared about, gone or lost or far away. Which way to turn? He had no idea.

When in doubt, always go right,
his favorite instructor, Captain
Barrick, had told him once after a sim in King’s Town. So he went right. He walked through the abandoned catacombs, peeking around corners and pausing whenever he heard a sound, making his way through the brightly lit corridors, encountering nobody and nothing. Until the fourth turn, when he was faced with a motionless body on the ground, two bullets in its back. He decided to leave it—if the man wasn’t dead, he soon would be—but instinct made him look back at the last second, and when he did, the man lifted his head and Thomas found himself staring into his brother’s eyes.

“T,” Lucas croaked, reaching out a tentative hand.

Thomas fell to his knees. His hands hovered over his brother’s back; he wanted to help, but there was nothing to be done. He swallowed the grief and the terror and took Lucas’s trembling hand in his own.

“I’m so sorry, Lucas,” Thomas said. Lucas’s eyes closed, and Thomas thought that might be the end. He was grateful for the chance to apologize, for things that he’d done and hadn’t done, said and hadn’t said. They might have been rivals, but Lucas was his brother, and Thomas loved him. That was something no one, not even the General, or Lucas himself, could destroy.

Then Lucas’s eyes struggled open again. “One … one … two …,” he struggled to say. Thomas attempted to comfort him, to stop him from speaking—it would only make it hurt worse, prolong the inevitable—but Lucas tried again, heedless of Thomas’s advice, perhaps impervious to the pain now.

“One … one … two … three … five … eight,” Lucas managed to say, after many pauses and horrible, wheezing breaths. “Ahead.”

“One, one, two, three, five, eight?” Thomas repeated. The first six numbers of the Fibonacci sequence, the king’s code,
Sasha’s magic numbers. How could Lucas possibly know them? And what did he mean by saying them now? And “ahead”? Ahead to
where
?

Lucas lowered his head and pressed his cheek against the cold stone floor. “Ahead.” The word came out with a long exhale, and then Lucas was still. Thomas reached out and closed Lucas’s eyes, then placed the palm of his hand on his brother’s dirty brown head in benediction. It was a church, after all, and Lucas deserved a blessing, even—perhaps especially—in death.

Then he rose to his feet and took off in the direction of an enormous crash.

A bullet whizzed past my head. I threw myself flat against the floor, not sure which direction it was coming from. We were in an industrial kitchen; there were half a dozen metal islands in each direction and several racks of hanging pots that made it hard to see. Selene was to my right, Callum to my left, and Adele was standing near the door, half-protected by a huge refrigerator, trying to get a clear shot at whoever was shooting at
us.

Shards of glass littered the floor, and I could see where they’d come from; there were milk crates full of drinking glasses stacked one on top of another in a nearby corner, and several of them had tipped over. There was blood, too, enough to indicate that there’d been a struggle. I knew it was Juliana’s blood; it sang to me, with that same trilling note that traveled along the tether. She was somewhere nearby.

Silence descended. Adele gestured for us to get up, and we rose to our feet. She advanced through the kitchen, taking corners with her gun pointed straight ahead, her finger motionless on the trigger, her face set into a stony expression of determination.

Out of nowhere, a body sprang from the shadows, careening right into Adele and knocking her off her feet. Her gun went flying and clattered to rest under a nearby table, far out of her reach. But she was wrestling with the Libertine who’d attacked her, throwing punches and aiming kicks at delicate areas, but the Libertine was ferocious. I couldn’t see a way of getting my hands on him to administer the power without hurting Adele. I looked to Selene, helpless, but her eyes were trained elsewhere, somewhere off to the left. I turned and caught a blur of movement, a curtain of dark brown hair swinging in the strange blue light of the kitchen: Juliana.

Selene took off running, and Callum and I followed. But instead of Juliana, we found three Libertines waiting for us around the next turn, guns trained on us.

“Hands up,” one of them demanded breathlessly. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Okay,” Callum said. “Don’t shoot.” He glanced at Selene and me; we all slowly lifted our hands, palms forward. The Libertines advanced; the one who’d spoken removed plastic zip ties from a hidden pocket and slipped them over Callum’s wrists first, perhaps considering him the biggest threat. The other two kept their guns on us.

The Libertine with the cuffs turned his attention to me, grabbing me by the hands and pulling me forward. I resisted but not too much, just enough that my hands were in the right position.

“I really wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Callum warned him.

“Oh yeah? Why—” But he didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. I closed my eyes and focused on opening up the tether, letting the power pour through my body, head to
heart to wrist to fingertips, until it shot out of my palms like twin beams of a lighthouse, catching him hard in the chest and throwing him to the ground. Selene turned to the Libertine to her right and did the same, this time to his stomach; the power slammed him up against one of the metal tables and sent a leaning stack of bowls crashing to the ground in a shower of ceramic shards.