City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World) (17 page)

Her face softened to something like regret. “It’s a terrible thing, but it isn’t just happening in Miroc. I can tell you that, Ash—it’s all over the world. Miroc may be the worst. It was never a natural city. Elsewhere—the whole world….” She sighed. “No one has the resources to save it.”

Seana herself was just another of the people waiting. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I took her hand, kissed her fingers. “Bring us the rain. Buy us some time.”

“Time. Of course.” Her eyes had gone unreadable again. She lay back down, but continued to watch me. The sun would be coming up soon, but she didn’t seem at all sleepy.

“Do you miss them?” she asked. My confusion must have shown. “The gods,” she clarified. “You were a priest. It must be…lonely?”

She’d never before wanted to know about my relationship with Kaifail. A little talk about the end of the world, and suddenly everyone discovers a spiritual side, I suppose. “I never had that kind of relationship with Kaifail. None of us did. He didn’t involve himself with us.”

The party line. So easy to say. And such bullshit. “We dealt with the Abandon fine because we didn’t lose anything. And that was for the best, really. I knew priests from the other churches. Churches where their god took an active interest.” I thought of Iris at the mural. “They were lost when the Abandon happened. Heartbroken. I can’t imagine what it was like.”

I squeezed her hand, not for her comfort, but my own. I stared up at the ceiling as the resentment I was always fighting to greater or lesser success bubbled up inside me. “I guess I did feel…all this time, we felt so independent, so proud of ourselves. We didn’t need Kaifail holding our hand, whispering in our ear. We were grown-ups.
 

“But all along, we—all of us—assumed that if we
did
need him, if something truly awful happened, that he’d be there. That he’d help us. That if things ever got really terrible, that he’d save us.”

Seana pulled her hand free, ran a finger down my cheek. “Maybe he wanted to. Something I’ve always regretted—what I never said to you. I promised myself if we ever crossed paths again—” She looked away, and then got up out of bed. Another touchpad, another panel, and she had a fresh stack of clothes. “I have work I need to get to. Stay and sleep, if you like.”

Just like old times. I didn’t know if this was true of all Jansynians, but Seana could and would go days without sleep once her mind was fixated on an important project. I envied that. “I think I will grab a nap before I head out.”

She nodded. She hadn’t once looked at me since she’d gotten out of bed. “Come back tonight, if you can. If your business allows it.” She didn’t wait for my answer, heading out of the room still half-dressed.

I could have called after her. It wasn’t like there were walls between us. But I respected her need for escape. And, to be honest, I was exhausted.

I dug my wireless out of my pants and set the alarm for two hours from now. All it took was to close my eyes and I was asleep.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

City on Fire

Exhausted as I was, I didn’t sleep well. Strange, restless dreams chased me. Seana and Micah hunted by Syed, who was both man and shadow all at once. I tried to help them, tried to save them, but we were out in the desert and I couldn’t breathe it was so hot and I wanted water—so badly wanted water.

I woke up sweaty and disoriented, clawing at my handset a long while before I could figure out how to stop the noise coming from it. Slowly, I remembered where I was and how I got here.

I went into the bathroom, and splashed water on my face. Then found myself staring at the sleek black shower stall. As long as I was here, how could I resist? Showers were a luxury I hadn’t known in a long time, since they drove my water bill higher than my monthly salary.

 
The touchpad in the shower took me a minute to figure out, but after that I was rewarded with the magnificent wonder of warm water all over my skin. Talk about reminders of a better time. This was pure, sensual bliss.

It woke me up better than the alarm had and relaxed me enough my brain kicked into gear. I would have loved another few hours of sleep, but there was too much to do, too much to think about.

The world was getting worse, not better. And maybe—just maybe—I could stop that. Not the ineffective fumblings that got me sent to the hospital last time, but real, substantive change for the better. All the pieces lay in front of me if I could get my head out of my ass long enough to figure out how to put them together.

I stepped out of the shower, refreshed and ready, when my wireless chimed—Amelia calling. As I reached for it on the bedside table, I noticed what else lay beside it.

The data stick. With all the information about the satellite project. Seana must have laid it here last night when she undressed. I grabbed it and slipped it in my pocket as I answered Amelia’s call.

“Are you watching the news feed?” Amelia asked in a flat voice without so much as a hello.

“Hold on.” I fumbled at the screen embedded in Seana’s wall across from the bed. It responded to my touch, and I dug through menus until I found what I was looking for.
 

Once I would have had to ask Amelia which feed she meant. These days, the only news we got—and the only news that mattered—was the city channel. I touched that option and Seana’s screen filled with images of thick, black smoke.

The camera pulled back and a reporter’s voice identified the scene. “The library at Dorian University is the latest target in the series of attacks that have shattered the morning quiet.”

The room suddenly felt colder. I couldn’t catch my breath. “What is this?”

Amelia’s voice in my ear drowned out the reporter’s litany of the damages. “Terrorists. Connected to the protesters I told you about before. They want the city to open up the reservoir and release the last of Miroc’s water reserves.”

On the screen, a map flashed up of all the attacks that had happened this morning. It looked familiar, but it took my stunned mind several seconds to figure out why. This same pattern—I’d seen it in Amelia’s office just yesterday—the work for another client. “You knew about this!”
 

“We knew it was coming; we just didn’t know how soon.”
 

For the second time in as many days, I was reminded just how little I actually knew about my employer. “Who’s
we
?”

Amelia ignored the question. “Listen to me. This highlights the urgency of getting that Desavris satellite to work. Tell me where you are with Seana.”

“I don’t think Seana’s the person I need to talk to.” I didn’t say any more. I couldn’t. Not here. Even if the wireless wasn’t being monitored, I couldn’t assume a lack of surveillance just because I was in the director’s own suite.

Fortunately, Amelia knew what she was doing. Probably even better than I did. She didn’t ask what I planned to do. Although honestly, she probably didn’t need to. “Make it your priority,” she said.

Image after image of devastation flashed by on the screen. Dorian library. The southside market. A public school. The martial academy. A shipping depot not far from the Crescent. Fire and rubble, but it didn’t look like any casualties were being reported. In fact, all these were building that had pretty much fallen to neglect as the city struggled to survive. “This was a warning shot, wasn’t it.”

“Very good, Ash.”
 

Another live shot of the still-burning library. I’d spent quite a lot of time there in the old days, but after the destruction of the churches, my sense of outrage had gone numb. “So what’s next?”

Amelia didn’t answer immediately and I reached up to turn off the news feed as the scene shifted to the reporter talking with people on the streets. I didn’t need to hear witness accounts. I’d witnessed plenty first hand.
 

“You just focus on your job.” Amelia’s words came out clear in the suddenly silent room. “Let me worry about mine.”

A dismissal. Except I had one more question. “How’s Iris doing?”

That evoked a smile I could hear. “She’s up and talking. Annoyed I’m making her stay in bed. I don’t imagine I’ll be able to keep her off her feet long.”

Relief went a long way to easing the tension the attacks on the city had evoked. “Say hi for me.”

“Say hi yourself. I want you back here to report this afternoon.”
 

She hung up on my affirmative.

#

Miroc was on fire. As I rode the lift down from the safety of Desavris, I had a clear view of smoke rising from five still-burning buildings and a number of smudgy dark clouds that marked fires recently extinguished. I waited to feel the panic, the suffocating chill I’d woken to for months after the riots that had hospitalized me. But time, it seemed, truly did bring healing, and a different emotion was rising within me. A clear, hot anger.
 

Terrorists, Amelia had said. And what better weapon than fire to bring terror to a city with no water?
 

I fished the security disc out of my bag and pressed it against my collarbone, where it would be easy to conceal under clothes. Unnecessary, as it turned out. The Jansynian man at the security checkpoint greeted me without scanning it. “Mr. Drake.”

Probably not a lot of humans going in and out on Seana’s say-so. “I need to borrow a vehicle.”

“How large?” he asked without arguing.
 

I fought to hide my surprise. This had been a gamble. I’d expected to have to throw Seana’s name around and pray she didn’t mind. But this was the Crescent, after all. The weight of Seana’s authority was unspoken and assumed. It would have been graceless to force me to say it.
 

“I’d prefer something small and mobile. The streets today are going to be—”

“Yes,” he cut me off. “Wait here, please.”

Minutes later, a woman on a sleek black cycle pulled up alongside the checkpoint. She slid a tiny card out from its handlebars, which the guard inside ran through his computer, then handed to me. “It’s keyed to your security disc and fully charged. It should suit your needs.”

“Thanks.” The woman hovered as I slid the card back into the cycle’s control panel and swung my leg over. As I settled in the seat, the engine came to life—a soft, humming vibration I could feel all through my body. I looked around for anything resembling an accelerator.

“It responds to your body-weight,” the woman said. “Lean forward to accelerate. Back to slow. It’s sensitive, so don’t overdo. The cycle will correct itself in emergency situations.”

I lifted my heels to the footrests and felt the cycle find its balance without my help. I took hold of the handgrips and leaned in. The bike zoomed forward towards the security fence. I pulled back. It screeched to a stop just short of collision.

I glanced back at the Jansynian woman, but she retained that perfect expressionlessness of which the Jansynians were so adept. The real question was, what would Seana hear about this?

I aimed myself at the gate and leaned forward again. Sensitive was an understatement. It was like the bike could read my mind. If I wanted to go slow, just thinking about forward gave the cycle enough cues to move. And if I really hunched down, we moved so fast it was almost like flying.
 

I could get used to this.

I raced through empty streets of blowing sand, until I’d gotten well out of range of any visual surveillance from the Crescent. I pulled over to the half-buried sidewalk, wished for some shade from the mid-morning sun, but miracles were out of the question these days.
 

I’d done the magic enough in the past couple days that the pattern to detect Jansynian spy tech came solid and energized to my mind with only a moment’s thought. Lucky thing, too, because today I actually found some.

Locators on the bike were no surprise. There were all sorts of legitimate, even helpful reasons for it to stay in contact with the computers back at Desavris. For my purposes, however, that wasn’t going to work.
 

The whole circuit board in the handlebars glowed blue, sending little tendrils of energy up into the air. This was going to take some delicate work if I still wanted the cycle to function once I was done. Taking one more quick look around to make sure I was alone on the street, I closed my eyes and focused on the pattern.

Magic is a slippery, finicky thing. We create patterns to help our minds lock magic into a shape we can control. The broad strokes, common controls and limitations, had standard symbols that everyone used so that places like the workroom in Kaifail’s temple could exist. But this was magic I’d figured out for myself, based on Seana’s explanations, and the pattern in my mind was an almost random series of numbers and shapes—suggestive of an order, but nothing that would make sense to anyone else who happened to see it. It was all metaphor, short-cuts and mnemonics to trick our brains into doing the things that came so naturally to Iris and her people.

But it worked. I concentrated on the imaginary images, muttered nonsense syllables that seemed to fit the rhythm. When I opened my eyes again, the fuzzy blue glow had sharpened, shrank. I stared, willing my vision to sharpen with the magic, until I could identify the tiny bridges on the chip that were sending out the signals I wanted to stop.
 

Three different locations. I leaned in, saw the blue lines reach up from one to strain in the direction of my collar. Searching for my identification. That one had to stay. The other two…

Another layer of control in my mind to limit the power to just those two circuits. And then a jolt, a flare, drawn from the energy of the bike itself. Just a touch—I hardly dared think about it. But I caught a tiny whiff of ozone and the blue glow faded away.

As satisfied as I could be that no one could follow, I set off for downtown and a looping, evasive ride to Spark’s safehouse.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Promises and Threats

As I pulled up to the building, Vik was out on the front steps, smoking a cigarette and watching the plume of black smoke clearly visible from the nearest of the fires. All business this morning, he didn’t give me any trouble. Just nodded. “Ash.”