Chapter Twelve: Running

 

I pulled everything I could into the enchanted sack Delia, Constantine, and I had created on campus a week before my expulsion. The Third Layer death-shift thundered closer—only about three miles out now. I slung the bag around my shoulder and clutched the loose cuff with shaking fingers.

Swallowing, I nudged the layer, slowing the shift's roll.

Magic leaped toward me from all directions, painting the broken sky in twisted patterns.

In front of the shift, Third Layer vehicles of all sizes flew toward us from multiple directions, dodging the jaws of the total shift with long practice and focused intent.

“No one good is on those transports.” I held the cuff, breath coming in small heaves. Panic was pulling my vision into spirals. I could see a new world at the end of the spiraled tunnel.

But it wasn’t our world.

If I followed it...

“No one in this blasted layer can be defined by that word,” Constantine spit. “We will be penned in one minute.”

He looked at my cuff and his fingers twitched as if to take it from me, but then he reached out and clasped it around my skin, muting the feelings of power. “She can’t do it. Pave this layer,” he said viciously to his roommate.

Axer shrugged out of his damaged battle cloak, and flexed his arms. Offensive magic, without a lick of the defensive magic inherent to wearing the cloaks, flowed in spiral designs down the skin below his black t-shirt as he calculated the distance of each caravan.

In response, the vehicles immediately zoomed sideways, in less distinctive patterns.

Axer smiled. “That won't help you,” he whispered to them, and the spirals increased speed along his skin—pulling into devastating patterns that I recognized. The death shift increased speed commensurately, as if anticipating such Pyrrhic victory.

“Weren’t you the sane one of the three of us a moment ago?” I asked. Adrenaline suppressed unhelpful emotions while the cuff suppressed the overwhelming feelings of infinite possibility. I fished Will's portal pad from the collected mess in my bag. Safety first, guilt and despair after. I quickly nudged the passive spell component that expanded the pad’s size parameters.

Axer cocked his head, gazing back at me from the corner of one eye, attuned to every change when in such a state. His magic immediately coiled back, spirals zipping up his arms, and he scooped up Rock Guard as the fitted cloak draped itself back around him.

“Sanity doesn’t mean I can’t revel in unavoidable provocation—just that I can recognize a better alternative when given one.”

He released the collected magic with a snap and the death shift responded by aggressively eating a few vehicles whose drivers weren’t quick enough to dodge.

“The drivers better have magical insurance or some really good protections,” I said, sparing a quick glance around the horizon.

Constantine’s face was carved from granite. “I will destroy every one of those Western Thirdies.” Darkness and certainty rolled through Constantine's emotions like the shift through the bleakness in the distance.

Tuning the pad with quick movements, I said, “I think that's a pejorative term.” Delia had never liked the term, that was for sure.

“I will pejorative their blood vessels. I will pejorative their children. You built that complex, you imbued it with your magic, you gave and gave, and they shoved—”

The pad opened to size. I grabbed Constantine—Axer’s hand already wrapped around my arm—and stuffed all of us through.

The layer shift violently increased speed and rolled over as the portal pad suctioned closed. Tus Onus was the programmed destination. Popping into an active troop encampment outside of it was not.

“—shoved you from the very place you conceived. That you—”

“There they are!”

I jolted as shouts and spells zinged toward us. Axer threw up a shield as the three of us fell to the ground simultaneously.

“—conceived. That you—”

I flared the used, narrowing pad outward like Constantine’s ribbon, draping it over us. A tunnel of darkness and flashing light spit us—as well as a section of the ground that had been around us—into the bright desert, and into a legion of armed brigands.

Axer’s shield was the only thing that saved us.

“—built. That you—”

Constantine didn’t stop speaking, but he grabbed the edge of the shrinking pad and furiously tugged it around us again.

We emerged teetering on the edge of a waterfall streaming over a rocky gorge.

A water dragon broke from the surface, and a rider with skin the color of the sky was balanced on its back propelling a spear of white toward us.

Axer spun the three of us as the spear whispered past, then pushed us into the pad once more.

We flopped on the hard ground of a wooded glen in a recently devastated section of the Fourth Layer. Ley circles spread before us and golden light sparked as my finger touched one.

“—made invulnerable.”

Two men in tattered robes emerged from the trees, eyes lighting manically. “The Origin Mage.”

A spell pit broke beneath us, sending us falling.

“Even better—”

A trap set for someone or something else was still a trap we couldn’t afford to be caught in. I forced the pad below us with a blast of magic.

Horns blared, an inhuman roar ripped through the air, and the men above swore. “They are coming! Hurry, grab her!”

We fell into the pad and instead of hitting the bottom of the pit, we were pitched out onto the hard pavement of the Third Layer city of Fawn that I had used more than once for transit.

Stavros was right—and not just about a pre-programmed pad—I defaulted to the same paths. It was a weakness and a habit I had to break.

I was unfamiliar with the two places the boys had chosen—both Fourth Layer spots—but suffice to say that we were either picking poorly or we were being tracked quickly.

“A bit of both, I think,” Axer answered, as all the people visible on the sidewalks slowly and cautiously backed away from us, some touching the skin beneath their ears. “We have twenty seconds. See if you can give us forty on the next one.”

“I’ll give them forty years,” Constantine said darkly. “Of flooding, of famine, of—”

I twisted the pad’s parameters to a place I had never been, but one I had starred on a mental map as a possible place to transport ferals to in the future. I tugged Axer and Constantine inside as Third Layer terrorists appeared.

We emerged in the wasteland, outside a small, dead space in the Third Layer.

Easily manipulated with minimal magic and not subject to shifts in the same way, dead spaces were scattered around the Third Layer. Each was a tiny oasis in the treacherous landscape—the paths to them known to the outlaws who traveled the badlands. Frost Viper had made certain I knew them all by the end of my first week in the compound.

I pushed both boys into the dead space as the shift spurred by our arrival rolled over the landscape. In the Third Layer, shifts were a constant constraint.

“I will make them rue,” Constantine said, barely stopping his continued diatribe for a breath.

As angry as he was at me for leaving him with Axer during the battle, then pushing him away from Stavros and Kaine, Constantine's fury was pinpointed elsewhere with true rage. “You brilliant, stupid, empathetic girl—giving them a way against you. I know ways around your designs. And they will rue this decision. Ungrateful, backstabbing ingrates.”

Axer’s gaze was analyzing and accounting for everything around us—the dead space, the apocalyptic shift now happening outside of it, and the contents of the supply bag. At some point during the madness, he had tucked a small device into his ear.

“I think the fact that three separate Third Layer terrorist leaders—including Vincent Godfrey's son—are heading toward the compound at high speed might have something to do with our expulsion,” Axer said, tone mild, gaze anything but.

Vincent Godfrey had been killed trying to destroy campus on Bloody Tuesday. I shuddered to think of his son's aims.

“No reports yet on this location,” Axer said, tweaking a buckled device on his cloak. “We have at least five minutes. Well done, Ren.”

Five minutes? I picked at the cuff. We were already exhausted from the earlier events of the day. We couldn’t sustain this madness.

Constantine’s eyes grew darker. “With Ren's wards, that complex could have repelled whoever they sent. No, the elders had this planned—long before the news hit the frequencies about the mass Awakenings. I guarantee it,” Constantine said darkly. “Insipid, panicked, backstabbing shivits.”

Axer spared him a glance. “You give too much credit to their ability to ignore ties that were woven long before any of us was born.”

I looked at my broken home ties—both sets of them. The people in the Western Territories compound weren't terrorists, no matter what the Department tried to spin, but the intertwining between factions across the Third Layer were rich, horrific, and complex. The many terrorist fronts had been demanding my release to them for weeks, but had been kept in check by the Territory elders and the long range plans we had collectively been spinning.

I was reminded of something the elder who had lived in Aurum had said to me:

 

“We are human, with all the fierce love and destructive hate that comes with it. While many clasp the hope—soft and gentle—that your magic could provide better lives for all in ten years' or twenty's time, others have a fiercer hope—the kind that rubs flesh with revenge, pride, and courage—now or never, a brasher and more desperate emotion.”

 

With my new status as the highest enemy of all states, it would pit anyone who had me under their roof against all others.

I was dangerous.

Constantine stepped toward Axer. “You know, this looks nothing like your island paradise—the one with overwhelming excess magics that the governments are always trying to sanction—with its ruminating bench where you can pick apart the motivations of people far and remote in the safety of your physical and magical separation from the rest of reality.”

There was a world of subtext strumming beneath every word—lies, liar, lying, hatred, loathing, pain. The two had been at detente for the last few months, revolving around a single common ally, but detente was different than forgiveness or friendship. Nothing had been solved between them—the giant morass of whatever was in their past still lay before them.

A giant pile of twigs, leaves, and tinder awaiting the dry season.

“After that lovely series of jumps, I don't need a bench to know that going to Itlantes would be an end game for all of us right now.” Axer was slowly rotating, gaze taking in every point in the distance. His shoulders were tight. For as little as he cared for nameless faces in a crowd, he was never unaffected by his roommate. “How many more hops can we make in that thing?” he asked me.

“Will’s design makes it unlimited as long as the recycling unit is engaged.” It was a joint project he and I had done with Loudon, Kita, Patrick, and Asafa. “But that doesn’t help us with the tracking issue.”

The Department could easily track the magic in the Second Layer, as could anyone in the other layers with a device designed for tracking travel magic.

Axer split his focused attention between his roommate's continuing rage—Constantine was now doing something with a cube he’d pulled from his pocket—my gathering of the pad, the broadcasts he was listening to on the small device in his ear, and the landscape at large. “It’s a marvel of between layer travel, but it’s not made for stealth.”

“Not yet,” I conceded. “I don’t think I can do better than this spot.”

Not if anyone in the Third Layer figured out a pattern—and patterns, unfortunately, came instinctively to me.

“We can't sustain ten-minute jumps for long, even if we could achieve them,” Axer murmured, head cocked, listening to something. “And though I have little sympathy for the people hunting us, unless we really do want to pave it—and possibly ruin the other layers at the same time—we can’t repeatedly churn the Third Layer. It will destabilize before we complete ten more jumps.”

I could probably do something about the destabilization—and probably kill us all in the fourth attempt with how controlled I was now—but jumping around with ten minutes' lead and having to stabilize every time would make us sweeper snacks within a day. I looked up, expecting to see one of the vulture-like animals circling.

“Our arrival here was just noted.” Axer's expression turned grim. “As of this moment, you are listed as kill on sight in the four other layers, if the murderer can transfer you to a Checkpoint in ten minutes' time. They are even handing out single use permitted First Layer Checkpoint transfer devices—like the one we used to transfer the ferals—free to anyone who registers. Anyone transported by one is taken straightaway to a detention facility at the Checkpoint.” He paused briefly before continuing, “And Ren, if you end up at a Checkpoint, you will disappear into Stavros's hands immediately and will be out of our reach forever.”

I expected Constantine to start swearing again, but he had gone unusually still, furious temper cooling into something colder and harder to chip at.

Axer looked at him, and I could see the slightest bit of unease run through Axer at whatever he was reading on his roommate.

“So, we...” I couldn't even finish the statement. Hide? Run every ten minutes—waiting for someone to take us during a last stand?

“The Third Layer isn't going to want to give you up to the Second. I had thought maybe a particular spot in the Fourth...” Axer shook his head. “But we should stick to the Third. If you are taken here, we still have the chance to find you.”

And vice versa—the more important point, to me, until I could safely absolve them from my fugitive status.

I touched the marble I always kept in my pocket. The marble that was far emptier than it had once been—still pulsed.

“Most of the places I’ve been to have been tracked and noted,” I said.

“Death.” Constantine looked out at the landscape, lips pressed tightly.

I looked at him. “I know you are furi—”

“Ours,” Axer said.

I stilled and looked at them.

“We need somewhere they won’t look. Or somewhere they can’t look.” His blue eyes pinned me like he already knew my secrets. “Make us disappear.”

“I meant you do it,” Constantine snarled, turning to him.

“They will search all the homes and installations of the allies I have made. We need those allies later. She can do it.”

“I know she can. But you would make her? Like this?”

“Yes.” Axer’s expression was hard. “She learns quickly. Even more so under strain when given a small amount of recovery, then another, harder challenge.”

“You would cause—”

“Don’t deny her who she is.”

“I never have.”

“But you will,” Axer said, intensity in his gorgeous eyes. “She won’t last in a gilded cage.”

“I know. Or she’d already be there,” Constantine said savagely. “You are ignoring the ramifications. This is a farseerstorm that you wish on your enemies but one you don’t want to see captured by a Level 10 container.”

“You, too, want her to be who she is.” Axer's gaze was mesmerizing. “Your fear can't deny your desire.”

“Fear can deny any desire,” he spit, and there was a loaded exchange of meaning between them. Communication that I was never privy to in their method of unbreakable communication.

I touched the marble again. It wasn't ready, and I had almost ended the world already today, but…

I looked at the boys, knowing that I was now responsible for their safety. There was no room for fear or failure.

“I can do it,” I said quietly, putting my hand on Constantine’s arm. “I won't...I won't end us. It will be creation. I can keep control.”

For their safety. For Rosaria and Carlos—Ren and Christian.

Constantine looked at me for a long moment. “Darling, I'm not one of your spineless Thirdies. You can ravage a thousand landscapes and twist everything under the sun into swirled lollipops and I'll just mock all those who forgot to bring their own stick.”

“I won't—”

Constantine rubbed at his temples. “Stop talking. I swear you were born with enough guilt for both of us. Just...don’t stick us in Flavel Valeris’ palace.”

“I won’t.” I breathed in deeply, feeling my other emotions bury themselves beneath. I could do this. I could be better than I’d been. I had to be.

I ran my right fingers along my pocket and left fingers over the cool marble, and let my fear join the other unhelpful emotions underneath.

Death. I looked at the drooping sky. What would Ori do in this situation?

It would lead a merry chase.

I pulled five small paper dragons from my kit. They fluttered excitedly.

I paused over the latch of the cuff, then unlatched it. Power flooded through me—all the greater for having been stoppered. I grabbed onto the lashing tendrils, but it was like roping a storm. Axer’s warm hand slid under my unbound hair and the power dimmed, siphoned away just enough for me to grab hold.

I knelt and concentrated. No rage, no anger of any kind—I submerged it all. Melancholy. Kinship with the layers and magic that flowed between all of them.

“First you.” I imbued the first dragon with a hefty dose of magic, and the broken layer crackled around me in response. If anyone hadn't known where we were, they did now. “Then you.”

The next dragon had less magic, and so forth, until the last of them held the barest amount. I then pulled out a sixth dragon and pulled the siphoned magic back, overloading the paper, pulling the freely extended magic from both boys, then encapsulated all of it in two vibrating fields around the distended creature.

I held up the first five. “Activate only when your predecessor is gone and your spell triggers. After that, you are free. Become a flower in the landscape, fly to new pastures, find each other—whatever you desire.” A small bit of trickery under their own control.

“Except you,” I said to the sixth. “Do you understand your task?”

It vibrated with swollen excitement.

I tuned the portal pad, imbuing it with timing parameters for six jumps. Each jump was spelled to one of the dragons.

“Three minutes,” Axer said, eyes fixed on a specific point in the landscape. “They’ll be in view soon.”

“Okay.” I swallowed. “Here we go.”

I activated the pad outside the dead space and the first dragon dove inside. The others followed, grasping the tendrils of each spelled jump. The last, bloated dragon eagerly zipped inside at the end, taking the pad with it—suctioned through the layer—our only external emergency escape.

We waited in agonizing silence as the layer shift rolled over and around the dead space, then Axer nodded. “Bait accepted. All crafts have changed course to the first of the pad’s points.”

A minute later, I felt the pop in my mind, and the layer rumbled. “Second jump initiated.”

I latched the cuff back into place. Immediately, Constantine’s dark emotions, and the crazed feelings emanating through him from Olivia, Neph, and the Bandits, dimmed.

Dimmed, but not completely absent. I could feel the brushes of the second dragon’s activation as the pad did its work at the second site a minute later.

Axer touched the metal. “A Level 9 suppressor cuff. It won’t last.” His fingertip touched a small, burned hole.

“I know,” I whispered. My very sweat glimmered with color these days. And paint had eventually eaten through every cuff I’d ever worn. “I’ll work through it.”

I shakily lifted the small black box that had splayed out with our supplies—a bubbled addition gifted from another source of magic in the compound as we'd been expelled—feeling the weight of it in my hands. I set it down on the uneven ground.

Constantine narrowed his eyes. “Is that—”

With a press against the sides, a large vehicle activated into the space in front of us. It was loaded with supplies and the inverted shielding wards I had helped create for the Ophidians' vehicles during free moments I had in the complex when I’d been trying to learn people's names and trades, and to help with whatever I could to make their lives better with the magic that I had.

Frost Viper—thank you.

“It is.” Constantine's darkness lifted the minutest measure with his own answered statement. As if his complete kill count had split to kill and “maim” counts instead.

“It's a non-magic way to get us to where we need to go as long as no one is following.”

I walked unevenly to the front of the bike, mounted the driver's seat, and mechanically checked the gauges. All magic, fluids, and evasive enchantments were topped. The spine of a manual on recycling spells peeked from the side of the vehicle where it was tucked.

Recycling spells. I'd become adept at the enchantments out of necessity at first, then interest later.

Still... I looked at the landscape outside the dead space, and touched my pocket again. Feeling his gaze, I looked at Constantine. He looked at the pocket I kept touching, then back at me, not even needing to read my mind, he knew me so well at this point.

“I'm driving.” He moved with purpose toward the front of the single, long seat.

“I can do it,” I murmured.

“I'm. Driving.”

“Do you remember the way?” I scooted backward, feeling stupid relief curl. I touched the control cuff. The long drive would require a constant touch of magic through the recycler.

“Every crater, Charybdis effect, sand wyrm, and siren-weed of it,” he said darkly, long leg lifting over the front.

After threatening the Ophidians with a bomb and instant death, his trip on a similar bike had been less than kind.

As the single passenger with Frost Viper, the best driver in the territories and the Ophidian leader for a reason, I'd had it easy. The ride had been amazing.

My mind shifted, looking out at the broken landscape.

There was something wistfully sad about fixing the entire layer. The outlaw vibe, killer animals who spun shifts, and jagged skies of death...

The sky crackled with green lightning outside the dead space, as if in answer.

“What if what I did makes the sand wyrms go extinct?” I murmured.

Constantine stopped checking the gauges, and Axer paused his task of fitting the rest of our supplies in the trunk compartment in the back.

Their heads slowly turned to me and both boys stared for an extended moment.

“What?” I asked.

Constantine narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you trying to cheer me up?”

“I got rid of the wyrms' homes—”

Axer's face changed, understanding softening the hard lines of it. “And they were all returned. Your book—”

I laughed without humor. “Exactly. I promised the people here that I would fix the Third Layer.” I touched my pocket. “And I...what am I doing? What do I know about fixing the world?”

“Quite a bit,” Constantine said darkly. “I'm pretty certain I saw my nightstand from the manor fly by in four separate pieces disconnected by threads of reversion magic.”

“That's...that's not helpful.”

“I never liked that nightstand.”

Axer motioned and Guard Rock ran up the side of the vehicle and flipped into the small recessed space between the trunk and seat that Axer had created.

I saw Constantine look back at them and his fingers twitch.

“Don't you dare,” I said.

“I'd never leave your rock,” he said blandly.

Guard Rock allowed himself to be strapped down, gaze already stretched to the distance—our small lookout to the rear.

I felt Constantine shift, and I pinched his side. “Don't you dare,” I hissed.

“With a few additional words, that sentence could be perfect.”

The bike shifted as Axer settled in behind me. Trapped between the two, I became instantly aware of the precariousness of my position and where to put my limbs.

“And, by the way, darling,” Constantine said, looking at me over his shoulder with a bland expression. “Just to be clear… If you push me to another location while you remain at a battle site again, I will tie you up and drop you into a dark hole,” he said, starting the engine. “Then I'll fish you out, make certain the bindings are still secure, then drop you in again.”

“Not handcuffed in the tower?”

“The oubliette,” he said darkly.

I let my forehead fall against his back, securing my arms around his midsection, Axer's thighs hugging mine.

School trips, science class, death, destruction, antipodean portals... I tried to think of a popular song that had always been playing on the radio—the one Christian used to hum then try to deny what he was singing.

A small bit of comfort crawled under my skin from Axer and from Constantine in response to whatever emotion I was exhibiting. I closed my eyes.