The Forgotten City (38 page)

D
iega ran, keeping to the shadows. An immense thirst dragged at her, and her lungs ached, but she pushed herself on, winding through a maze of black-rock corridors and deserted rooms. Finally she reached a hallway that seemed more brightly lit. Her skin prickled with nerves. She smelled a sharp metallic scent and immediately recognized it. A doorway appeared up ahead. She slowed her steps, moving with caution until she was beside the door. With her blade in one hand, she peered around into the room and saw red on the floor, dripping from a table with leg stirrups and smeared across the bars of a cage built back into one rock wall. Equipment had been shunted away from the table and there were drag marks leading across the floor to a meaty lump. Steeling herself, Diega stepped into the room and walked over to it, nudging it with her foot. Then she recognized it as a placenta. The blood drag lines continued past it to a large metal cask that looked like a bin with a chute going into the wall.

“
Fsx
,” Diega cursed under her breath. She didn’t want to open the lid. She didn’t want to see Silho in there. It was not so long ago that she’d wanted Brabel dead – she would have even killed her herself – but now all she wanted was to find her alive.

Diega forced herself to move to the bin and throw back the heavy lid. On a stash of crumpled papers and towels that were blocking the chute hole, the body of a woman lay pressed up against one of the walls. She had no pulse and her abdomen was cut open wide. She’d been given a rough caesarean and then been left to bleed out. By her bloodline marks she was human-breed, cat-blood. The tear tracks had dried on her face.

Diega grabbed a towel to cover the girl’s head and recoiled as she uncovered a tiny baby boy, lying so still like a little doll, his skin pale gray and streaked with blood and birth matter. An unexpected grief hit her and she reached down and picked up the cold bundle. She held his little face against her cheek and rubbed his back.

“No, no, no,” she whispered. “No …”

Part of her realized it was crazy hugging a dead baby when she needed to be moving on as quickly as she could – but part of her couldn’t let him go. Tears welled in her eyes and she found herself crying aloud for the first time since the United Regiment guardians informed her parents that Ariana had been one of Englan Chrisholm’s victims. This universe was so sick and twisted – she was tired of it.

The baby shivered against her and she pulled away, staring down at the tiny infant lying in her arms. His eyelids flickered. He was alive.

A force struck Diega from behind, slamming her against the bin. All her strength drained from her and the baby slipped from her grasp, back onto the towels beside his dead mother. Diega clung to the side of the bin, fighting to keep upright, but the drag was too intense and she fell straight onto her back, smashing her head on the rock floor. She stared at the ceiling with dizzy sparks buzzing around her and heard footsteps approaching.

A man came to stand over her. He leaned down and she saw firebird dragon bloodline marks and orange-black eyes with long, thin pupils. A red
Tehron
,
similar to Silho’s, glowed from his eyes, and she remembered his face as one of the Omarians who had attacked them at Sirenseron.

She swore at him in Fenlen, “
Kitcher
.”

The man squatted down and ran a hand over her body, touching everywhere, though it felt more like a medical examination than assault.

“Yes, you’ll do,” he murmured.

Diega fought against his light-form vision, trying to break out from his influence, but he was far too strong. The man turned sharply at movement behind them and Diega saw a group of other Omarian soldiers dragging Shawe into the room.

“Imperator Hycinion – we found this one near Dragonsden,” one of the Omarians said.

Shawe spotted Diega and yelled out, “Get off her or I’ll break your trutting neck!”

He tried to fight, but even Shawe’s enormous strength was reduced to nothing. The Omarians started kicking him with their pointed shoes, hard enough to kill.

“No!” The Imperator stopped them. “Lock him up. Let him watch.”

The soldiers hauled Shawe to the cage in the corner and threw him inside. Fire from their hands welded the doors locked. Once their light-form influence was lifted, Shawe leaped up and grabbed the bars; the metal burned his skin with a hissing sound, but he didn’t let go.

The Imperator grabbed Diega up and dumped her onto the operating table. She felt the dead mother’s blood seeping through her clothes. He gestured to the other soldiers and they came forward to assist. They took her weapon belt and chucked it onto the ground, then strapped her down and hooked her up to the abandoned machines, stabbing needles into her arms and injecting burning liquids. They worked silently until one of the soldiers took a sudden step back from the table.

“It’s happening – we’ve run out of time!” he yelled. “He’ll take us all!”

“Silence!” The Prince’s orders are to continue working!” the Imperator commanded. His soldier kept yelling, so he threw a fireball back and incinerated him, without so much as a blink.

Diega shivered. They started to rip her clothes away and she shut her eyes, going somewhere else in her mind –
if you’re not here, it doesn’t hurt
. She sensed she was going to die on this table, and could only think it was what she deserved.

A roar shook the air, and the Imperator paused. He looked over his shoulder and listened. Then his eyes widened. He abruptly broke off what he was doing to Diega and said to the others, “To the roof – now!”

He ran out the door, the others following. Their draining influence lifted off Diega, but she stayed lying where she was – too drug-weakened to move and too soul-dead to care.

“Hey! Wake up!” Shawe shook the bars of the cage. “Morph me out”

“I can’t,” she said, the chemicals slurring her words.

“You can! I saw you have your skill back!”

“I don’t want to live anymore,” Diega whispered.

“What!” the gangster spat. “What the trutt do you mean, you don’t want to live anymore? We just crossed half a trutting planet, and now you’re giving up?”

Diega let her heavy eyelids blink closed and she murmured, “She was right there. I let her die – for a bracelet – a piece of metal …”

“What are you talking about? Who died?” Shawe demanded.

“Ariana.” She hadn’t said her sister’s name aloud in so long. It hurt.

“Who the trutt is Ariana?” Shawe said.

Tears trickled out of the corners of Diega’s eyes. “Sister.”

“Your sister? Wasn’t she taken by the witches?”

“I saw them take her,” Diega said, and felt a rush of relief at finally confessing the truth. “And I didn’t do anything to help her.”

The gangster gave a harsh laugh. “What do you think you could have done? If you’d tried to get her back alone, the witches would have killed you. If you’d run for help, they would have vanished anyway. Either way, there was nothing for it.”

These were the words she’d longed to hear for so very long, but she found they did nothing to lift her now.

“I was jealous,” she continued, whispering her final confession. “My parents loved her and they didn’t care about me. I heard my mother saying once she wished they’d never had me.” The words ripped open old scars, sending fresh pain coursing through her.

“So blame them!” Shawe said, his fury rising. “What the trutt were they doing saying things like that? It’s straight unluck you were born to them – you were just a kid. You didn’t deserve that!”

His words stirred a flicker of anger in her. It was true. She hadn’t been unlovable. She had been just a normal little girl, trying to find acceptance, craving love – and they’d treated all her efforts like an embarrassment. Diega remembered the many nights she’d sat in her room, sent there for some minor misbehavior or another. She’d hugged herself and cried, hoping she would hear her mother’s footsteps on the stairs coming to see her, to talk to her, to tell her it was alright. She never came – not once. But Ariana had, every time. She’d snuck in food, a book, a toy, a comforting smile – always – and Diega had let her die …

“I just let her go.” Diega felt immense pain in her chest and let her mind drift into darkness to escape from it.

“Okay, answer one question.” She heard Shawe’s voice from a distance, calling her back. “Did you know she was going to get hurt or killed?”

It was a question she’d never asked herself, but in all honesty … “No, I never thought that.”

“You didn’t know. If you had, would you have helped her?”

“Yes.” Diega answered without hesitation.

“Then, conversation over – problem solved. Morph these bars – we need to go!” Shawe said.

Diega didn’t move. None of this mattered. Nothing would bring her sister back.

She could hear Shawe breathing heavily, waiting for her. Suddenly he said, “Listen, when I was a kid, my brother was a baby. Our mother was useless as tits on a bull, and our father didn’t give two stuffs on the best of days, so I was lumped with him. How well do you think a nine-year-old kid like me is going to do watching a baby? I just wanted to hang around with my boys, not wipe his arse and trutting bottle feed and figure out why the hell he was crying all the time. The number of times he could have got killed … Once he set the house on fire; another time he locked himself in a box; once he climbed up on a high wall and jumped; once he stole a transflyer and crashed it; once I even sold him to a scullion for half a pint and then he ended up in the river. What I’m saying is, my brother means everything to me – you saw what I was willing to do to rescue him – and still he could have died a thousand times when we were growing up. Because I was a kid, too – and I didn’t think! Are you hearing me, sunshine? You were a kid! You can’t blame yourself! It wasn’t your fault!”

“But your brother’s still alive,” Diega said numbly. “You saved him.”

“Okay. How about this – my father liked my brother more as well. I know how it feels to never once be good enough or do anything right – to be knocked around and put down all the time. Growing up all I ever heard was
you’re stupid, you’re useless, you’re weak, you’re a girl, you’re an embarrassment, you’re not my son
… And when the United Regiment shot him up, I could have run out and dragged him to cover, but I didn’t, because I honestly wanted him dead. And I don’t feel a scrap of guilt.”

Diega turned her head to look at him – she saw sadness deep in his eyes, but his
Tehron
shone out of him like a sky full of green stars.

“I don’t care at all,” he repeated. “You look forward – you don’t look back. Do you understand? Diega – you never look back!” He shouted the last words and shook the bars.

A thin cry rose from the bin and Shawe’s eyes widened.

“What is that?”

The sound drilled into Diega’s mind.

“The baby!” she said. Instantly, she morphed the bars of the cage and Shawe burst out. He ran to her, but she gestured to the bin.

“No – get the baby first!”

She ripped out the tubing in her arms and stomach as Shawe lifted the squirming infant out of the bin. His weak cry rose to a shriek.

“No, no, kid, kid, listen – no crying, shhh, shut it – seriously …” Shawe tried to rock the baby, patting at it awkwardly.

Diega sat up and slid off the table, hitting the ground hard. Her face and legs were numb. She dragged herself to her weapon belt as Shawe put the squealing newborn against his chest and started singing a soft Galley tune. The tiny boy quieted, closing a little hand around one of Shawe’s fingers. The gangster’s skin looked so scarred and worn in comparison.

Diega grabbed the narc-gone off her belt and sprayed it into her face, canceling the effects of the drugs in her system. She stood and clipped the belt around her, then Shawe handed her the baby. He had the Omarian bloodline marks of the firebird dragon.

“Something’s going down,” the gangster said, nodding to the door.

“Then let’s go,” Diega replied, using a towel to bind the baby to her chest. The feeling of wanting to give up lingered faintly, whispering in her ears, weakening her limbs, but she forced herself to move. She could feel the baby’s heart beating against hers. If she gave up now, he would die with her, and that was unacceptable. That thought kept her moving – one step at a time.

Shawe went to the door and paused beside it. He peered out, checking one way and then the other, then gestured to Diega. She followed him out of the room and into a long corridor. It felt distinctly wrong to be heading into battle with a baby in her hands instead of an electrifier, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. The Omarians had taken her blade, the only weapon she’d had left.

“Do you have a spare blade?” she asked Shawe as they jogged toward the end of the hall.

He reached down and snatched something out of his ankle holster, handing it back to her. She turned the rusty-looking relic over in one hand, keeping the other on the baby’s back.

“What am I going to do with this?” she asked. “Give someone tetanus?”

Shawe snorted. “Shows how much you know! That blade is ancient Serpian and has more bite to it than anything you’ve ever held in your hand. If your boss saw it, he’d probably faint on the spot – it’s that prime.”

“Sure,” Diega muttered.

The heat ahead of them intensified, rippling the air, and Diega’s steps hesitated.

“I can’t,” she said, holding up her hand to shield her face, unable to even lift her eyes.

“Harden up, princess!” Shawe barked. “Follow me and keep moving!”

She gritted her teeth and pressed forward behind him, his bulk providing some cover. They ran all the way to where the corridor widened out into an open cavern. The path led them to a bridge crossing over the top of a lava river that ran through the middle of the castle. As they moved across it, lava spat up at them and Diega tried to shield the baby’s head.

Just as they reached the other side, Shawe stopped suddenly. A narrow path had been cut into the black rock ahead of them. It looked barely big enough for the gangster to fit through.