Kingsbane

Harkan was in the group nearest her, running swiftly through the tall grass—revolver in hand, sword swinging at his side.

She sent a silent prayer into the night to the deceitful saints she had glimpsed in Zahra’s vision: Keep us safe. Help us run swiftly. Light our path.

Her castings jolted, sharp and hot, startling her.

Immediately, the outpost exploded—a series of detonations along the front wall. Four total, blasting great holes through the wall and the outbuildings. Debris and adatrox alike went flying. An alarm bell clanged from one of the high watchtowers. Shouts and cries of pain rang out from the ruins.

Eliana stopped running, breathless.

Patrik’s plan had only called for a single explosion, one of their precious remaining bombardiers thrown at the open doors. The chaos would allow them to fight their way inside, at which point they would detonate two more bombardiers and release a barrage of smokers. Patrik and Harkan and a few of the others would remain outside the laboratory, fighting off adatrox and creating as much confusion as possible with what remained of their ammunition. Eliana, Jessamyn, and their party of four others would enter the Fidelia laboratory. The others would gather as many survivors as possible and help them out of the compound by way of a small auxiliary door that Patrik’s scout, Ursula, had discovered during one of her patrols.

And Eliana and Jessamyn? They would slaughter anyone who got in their way, allowing the laboratory prisoners time to get to freedom.

That was the plan. But those explosions did not belong to a bombardier.

They belonged to Eliana.

She felt their echo, tingling in throbbing patches along the underside of her arms.

Her heart pounding, she turned her hands over and back again, examining her palms, then her knuckles, her wrists. It was happening again—her castings, pulling at the empirium unpredictably, just as they had done in her rooms, with those rows of snapping fire, and in the Nest, flames devouring the market like disease.

Zahra’s box, stuffed in her coat pocket, began to hum as if the explosions had awoken it.

Eliana clamped a hand over her pocket, wildly hoping that the box would shatter—but it remained intact, and its humming ceased abruptly. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to calm her racing heart. She should have made her castings larger, stronger. More chains, more metal, entire plates of it, her hands weighed down by layers upon layers, enough to stifle any instincts her traitorous body possessed.

Perhaps then her castings would function as they were supposed to, wrangle her confusion into order, subdue her fear, channel the power she could not seem to control.

“El!” Harkan roared from somewhere in the smoke. “Come on!”

His voice jolted her. She ran.

At the entrance to the outpost, smoke-riddled and scattered with tiny fresh flames, swords rang and shots fired. Eliana pounced on an adatrox guard, Arabeth in one hand and Nox in the other. He swiped at her clumsily with his sword; she ducked, spun, gutted him, and ran on. Another was locked in combat with Viri, a few feet away. Eliana ran for them and plunged Arabeth into the adatrox’s back just as he reached for his gun.

“Thank you!” Viri said, panting. A flash of white, a smile in the smoke, and then he was gone.

Eliana ran on toward the heart of the compound. Bombardiers exploded around her; she tried not to count the explosions, tried not to think about their dwindling ammunition supply. Her hands blazed around the hilts of her daggers. She tried to ignore that as well. It meant nothing. It was her burns, still tender, never allowed the chance to heal. It was the heat of the burning outpost around her. There was no danger; her castings wouldn’t once again summon unquenchable fire that would devour them all, as it had in Annerkilak.

She found the laboratory at the same time Jessamyn did. They tried the door—heavy and wooden, reinforced with metal bars—but it was, of course, locked. Jessamyn cursed and swiped a hand across her smoke-stained face. The four others in their laboratory team joined them, their sweat-slicked skin caked with dust, but their eyes blazing.

“Stand back,” Jessamyn ordered them all. Eliana complied, ushering the others back and noting with an automatic appreciation that came from years of living as the Dread how elegantly Jessamyn moved through a battlefield, how easily she existed in her own body. Eliana hurried the others to shelter behind a neatly stacked pile of bodies, their discolored, chapped skin marred with familiar sores.

Jessamyn joined them, unflinching, though she tossed a horrible glare at the bodies. “This is bullshit,” she declared, and then she withdrew a bombardier from her pocket, kissed it, and glanced at Eliana. “Last one.”

She tossed it at the laboratory’s stone wall. Seconds later, it exploded, the structure giving way with a groan. The entire front wall wavered and collapsed.

Eliana ran for it, Jessamyn beside her and the rest of their team just behind. Inside the laboratory, they met a squadron of four adatrox, the brutes coughing and bewildered, struggling stupidly through the rubble. Eliana dispatched two, gladly falling back into the rhythm of her former life—Arabeth to the gut, Nox to the throat. She whirled, saw Jessamyn yank her own dagger from another guard’s belly and then spin to meet the other. She knocked his arm with her elbow right before he fired his gun. The shot went wide and harmless down the corridor. Jessamyn wrenched his arm, breaking it with a horrible snap. He cried out, those dead gray eyes flickering, and then she drew her blade across his throat and watched him drop.

One of the refugees in their party, a solid, kind-eyed woman named Catilla, who was adept with a sword, turned away and promptly got sick on the floor. Another refugee, Jaraq, crouched beside the bodies, swiftly searching their uniforms for keys.

Jessamyn’s blazing eyes met Eliana’s. She jerked her head at the corridor beyond. “Shall we?”

As the only one to have been inside a Fidelia laboratory, Eliana had drawn a map of the Rinthos facility for the team leaders to examine. If this building was anything like that one, she knew exactly where the prisoners would be kept. If it wasn’t, they would improvise.

Jaraq cried out in triumph. “Here!” He tossed a ring of keys at Eliana.

She caught it, nodded once at Jessamyn, then turned and hurried down the corridor. Galvanized lights flickered overhead, their casings shattered. From outside came the distant sounds of battle, fading as Eliana ran deeper into the laboratory, her team close behind her. Rasping, inhuman cries filled the air, sounds that the black animal deeps of Eliana’s gut recognized with a horrible lurch.

They reached the first of several metal doors, the number forty-seven painted tidily on a rectangular plate at eye level.

Eliana bent, fumbling with the keys. Her bandaged hands felt suddenly clumsy, and the screams of those trapped in this building wrapped her in a gummy fog that slowed everything except her racing heart. She thought of Navi, couldn’t help but think of Navi and wonder if she was dead. If after everything they had done to save her, she had died anyway at the hands of the Empire.