Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952) (120 page)

The futures of danger suddenly multiplied, branching, and as I looked at them my heart sank. “Oh crap.” I started running the way Ja-Ja had come, across the rooftops. “Come on!”

Anne looked from me to my flat, startled. “Luna and Vari—”

“They're not coming for Luna and Vari!” I called back. “They're coming for us!”

I heard a sharp breath and then Anne was running after me. “How?” she called.

“Gater!” I'd already looked into the future and seen the oval portal appearing above my flat and Will's group pouring through it. Given the trend I was guessing it was from a gate adept, and that was bad news. As long as Will's group had access to gate magic we couldn't outrun them—they'd just gate ahead to cut us off. The only way to lose them would be to get away from their gater's known locations.

I dodged between chimneys and scrambled over roofs, trying to get to the end of the street. Anne can't see in the dark but she's quick and fit and she was keeping up well. Behind I felt the flicker of gate magic and knew Will and the rest were on the rooftops too. Sirens were starting to sound in the distance, but I knew that by the time they got here it would be too late, and Will's adepts were more than a match for the police anyway. Running barefoot on the bricks and tarmac I felt vulnerable. I was wearing only my T-shirt and trousers, and the only item I was carrying was the two discs of my forcewall, left forgotten in my pocket after my meeting with Cinder and Deleo. Maybe if I used them to block the roof behind us . . .

I felt the flicker of gate magic again and skidded to a halt. “Shit,” I said into the darkness.

Anne dropped down behind me. “What's wrong?”

“They've split,” I said. “Half in front, half behind.” They were in two groups of three now. Looking into the futures in which we kept running, I saw all of them turn into a flurry of chaos and battle. If we kept going as we were we'd be caught in minutes.

Anne looked around. “The house below's empty—”

“We'd be fish in a barrel,” I said. Going across the rooftops was out. To our left was the street, but that would just get us boxed in. The safest direction was through the back lots to the right, but then we'd run into the railway line . . .

. . . Oh.

That could work.

I turned and headed for the edge of the roof. “This way. Fire escape over the edge.”

The fire escape was painted black and almost invisible in the darkness. I dropped and heard the metal
clang
beneath my feet, then kept going down until the fire escape levelled out. Ahead was a fenced area leading into the building's car park and to our left was the brick wall of the building itself. To the right was a sheer drop onto railway lines.

I led Anne across until the second set of lines were right beneath us. They emerged from a tunnel under the building and continued for about a hundred feet before disappearing beneath the next street over. “Jump over and hang on to the other side,” I told Anne, pointing at the railings.

Anne hesitated for an instant then obeyed, swinging her legs over to stand on the walkway on the other side of the railings. “You know what you're doing, right?”

“There's a freight train coming in two minutes,” I said. “We're going to hitch a lift. I'll time it for both of us but you're going to have to let go exactly when I tell you.”

Anne looked down. It was more than a twenty-foot drop to the wood and steel of the railway tracks. She looked back up at me. “Just so you know, there are
really
few people whom I'd trust if they told me to jump onto railway lines.”

“I know.”

“Please make sure you get this right.” There was a trace of nerves in Anne's voice.

“I will,” I said. “Can you see Will's gang?”

Anne nodded up and over my right shoulder. “They're coming.”

A rumbling sound echoed through the tunnel and I felt the walkway beginning to tremble beneath my feet. “I'll count you down,” I said. “When you hit, drop and stay low.”

Anne took a breath and then slid her hands down the railings, swinging down to a crouch. The rumbling grew louder, rising to a roar. “Get ready,” I called over the noise of the train. I heard a clang from above and knew Will was close, but I didn't take my eyes off Anne. She looked back at me through the railings, silent and tense. “On zero,” I called. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .
zero
!”

As I said
one
, the rails below us brightened and the engine roared past in a sudden rush of wind and metal and noise. Anne dropped exactly as I said
zero
, twisting as she fell. She landed catlike on hands and feet in the centre of the first freight carriage, and I vaulted the railing and dropped after her.

There was one sickening moment of free-fall where everything hung suspended, then I crashed into the metal of the carriage with a painful
thump
, bruising my feet and shoulder as I rolled. I came up just in time to see the roof of the next tunnel heading towards me and I went flat.

The train went into the tunnel and the world became pitch-darkness and deafening noise. The tops of the freight cars were flat metal and there was nothing to hold on to, so all I could do was lie flat and hope. I could feel the steady vibration of the wheels through the car, the carriage going
cha-chunk cha-chunk . . . cha-chunk cha-chunk
again and again. The time in the tunnel felt like an age, but looking back I don't think it could have been more than a minute. Finally with a
whoosh
we were out in the open and I rose to a crouch, looking around.

The train had come out onto a stretch of open track. To one side houses and gardens slid by, while behind us the tunnel mouth receded away, one freight car after another emerging into the fuzzy darkness of the summer night. Cables and girders slid by above as the train rolled along at a steady twenty-five miles per hour. The freight carriages were rectangular and dark-blue; the metal gave good footing but there was no cover unless you wanted to get down into the gap between the cars. Anne was at the front of the train on the first carriage, but behind us the cars were still appearing from the tunnel and I looked into the future, searching for movement. Nothing . . . nothing . . . crap.

I heard a clang from behind me and didn't look around. Anne stepped up next to me, peering back through the darkness. “Anything?”

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

Anne sighed. “Bad.”

“We've got three of them still on our tail,” I said, pointing down to where the end of the train faded into darkness. “Will, the Chinese kid, and Captain America.”

“What's the good news?”

“The good news is I think we've lost the others.”

Anne shook her head. “You've got a funny definition of good news.” She touched my shoulder and I felt a soft warmth spread through me as the ache from the bruises I'd picked up went away.

“Thanks.” I walked to the middle of the carriage, taking the gold discs out of my pocket.

“I guess this is a problem with trains as an escape plan,” Anne said, looking around. The rush of wind was steady, but not loud enough to drown out voices. “Once you're on it's kind of hard to get off.”

“Does tend to be.” I placed the discs at either edge of the car, checking to make sure the vibration of the train wouldn't bump them off. The timing on this was going to be tight. Will's group was advancing up the train; we had no more than a minute.

“Is that another forcewall?”

“Yep.” I squinted down the line of where the forcewall would activate, then looked around. We were on the train's fourth carriage: behind us were the third, second, and first carriages, followed by the engine. “Okay. When I tell you to go, I need you to get back off this carriage to the next one up.”

Anne raised her eyebrows. “While you stay behind?”

“Oh, don't worry, I'll be right after you,” I said. “I don't want to get any closer to this than I have to.” Movement caught my eye from down the train, and I stepped back. “Here they come.”

Will and the other two adepts came out of the darkness like flitting shadows, leaping from car to car as the train rumbled through the night. As they saw us waiting for them they slowed, Will letting the other two catch up, then they made the jump onto the fourth carriage where we were standing and stopped about twenty feet away. Will stood in the centre with Captain America backing him up; both wore what looked like light ballistic vests and Will was holding a shortsword in his left hand that I was pretty sure was the same one that he'd stabbed me with back in the casino. The Chinese kid hung a little farther back. Unlike the other two he didn't have any visible weapons or armour. The five of us stared at each other in the darkness.

“So,” I said at last. “I'm guessing I should take this as a ‘no' on the truce offer?”

Will's eyes stayed locked on me. “End of the line.”

“You wish,” I said. Will didn't look away, and neither did I. The seconds stretched out, violence hanging in the air.

“You know,” Will said suddenly, “before we do this, there's something I want to know.” He stood facing me in the darkness, easily keeping his balance on the rocking train. “Why us? You could have picked any adept in England. What was so important about my family that you had to destroy our lives?”

I looked at Will for a moment, then sighed. “I don't know.”

“You don't know.” Will's voice was flat.

“Richard told us to get Catherine. He never told us why.”

Will studied me. “Just following orders, huh?”

“I'd like to say it was something better than that,” I said. “But yeah. That pretty much sums it up. I tried to undo it, but by then it was too late.”

“Wow. Guess you've had a tough life.”

I looked at Will silently.

“Good thing it's over.” In a blur of motion Will levelled a handgun at my chest and pulled the trigger.

Before the gun fired I said the command word. To normal eyes nothing happened. In my sight the two gold discs flared to life and a forcewall flicked into existence on top of the train, forming a vertical barrier separating the adepts from me and Anne. An instant later I saw the flash of the gun.

Forcewalls work by transferring momentum; any body impacting the wall from either side has its momentum transferred into the object the forcewall is anchored to. Force mages can anchor their walls as they choose but for one-shot items like this, which work on command and only for a limited time, the anchor target has to be built in. In the case of my gold-disc walls, the anchor is set to whatever the discs rest on—in this case, the freight car.

The bullet from Will's gun left the barrel at a little over twelve hundred feet per second and travelled the distance to the forcewall in much, much less time than it took me to flinch. As it struck the forcewall its momentum was transferred through the gold discs down into the body of the freight car. The bullet was fast, but momentum is a function of both velocity and mass, and the bullet had a mass of only about a quarter of an ounce. The freight car had a mass of somewhere north of sixty thousand pounds, not counting its cargo. The freight car didn't even quiver.

Will emptied his gun at me, the steady
bang bang bang
muffled through the forcewall. The rest of the shots accomplished about as much as the first. At last the gun clicked empty and he lowered it, staring.

The squashed bullets were lying at the foot of the wall on Will's side, vibrating slightly with the movement of the train. It was hard to tell in the darkness but it looked like Will had been using hollow-point ammunition, designed to expand upon hitting its target. It's not much good at getting through armour or shields but leaves very nasty wounds in a living body, making it the kind of bullet you use for shooting someone whom you don't expect to be well protected and whom you really aren't interested in taking alive. “Are you done?” I asked.

Will pulled out a clip and began reloading. As he did he spoke sideways to Captain America. “Got anything that'll blow through that?”

Captain America gave Will a disbelieving look. “On a train?”

“Wait,” Anne said. “You're the one who set that bomb?”

“Uh . . .”

“How could you do that?” Anne demanded. “You could have killed everyone in the flat!”

“It wasn't aimed at the room you were in,” Captain America said, but he sounded defensive.

“Not aimed—! You dropped the roof on my head! If Alex hadn't gotten me out of the way it would have crushed me!”

“Wait,” the Chinese kid said uneasily. “You were in the living room.”

“I
moved
!” Anne was nearly shouting, which was quite something from her. “Don't any of you realise what you're doing? You can't just play around with this! People are going to die!”

“That's the idea,” Will said curtly. “Get out of the way and you won't be one of them.”

“How can you still think you're the good guys when you do things like this?” Anne demanded. “You're going to—”

Will had put away his handgun and shortsword. Now he held his hand out to Captain America, who reached into what looked like thin air. I felt the flicker of space magic as Captain America pulled two full-sized submachine guns out of a portal so faint as to be almost invisible, handing one to Will and keeping the other for himself.
Dimensional storage,
I thought.
So that's where they keep getting those weapons from.

Will cocked the gun and levelled it at Anne. “I'm not asking,” he said in a flat voice. “Verus murdered my sister and I'm going to kill him for it. Get in the way and I'll do the same to you.”

Anne hesitated, her eyes flicking between the guns, and I knew what she was thinking. Life magic is powerful, but it has two weaknesses: it's touch range only, and it doesn't have any defences against direct physical attack. Anne is very good at healing, but both she and her patient have to be
alive
for her to do any healing, and bullets do damage much faster than she can heal it. The last time she'd run up against men with guns it hadn't gone well for her. “Let me ask you something,” I said to Will. “Say you actually manage to pull this off. What then?”