City Of Souls (41 page)

“Okay, Jas. I’m going to get you out of here,” I said, going to work on one of the restraints. I latched one foot in a lower rung, as water continued to rage at the wall, rising swiftly. I had no idea where to take her once I did free her. To a broken world where the sky had caved in? Back to a family that might have been crushed under its weight? Certainly not to Midheaven. The passage alone would kill her, even if the way wasn’t locked.

As if on cue, a piercing wail sounded, almost directly through the walls.

So the sky was falling, the water rising—neck height now—Skamar was dying, Jasmine drowning…and I couldn’t get this damned knot untied!

So swim away, you idiot!
I glanced up. Because I could. I could decamp to Midheaven again, disappear into another world, saving myself, escaping it all.

Catching my look, Jasmine smiled, bittersweet. “I wondered how long it would take you to think of it.”

I shook my head and went back to work. She winced in response to some sound I couldn’t hear, and I felt the shudder slide into me, as if our bodies had melded where they touched. “Don’t worry. I’m not—”

She cut me off. “I would.”

Surprised, I jolted and my foot slipped, sending me far enough underwater that I got another mouthful of the briny stuff. It was metallic and gritty, trace amounts of gasoline making pretty liquid rainbows off the heaving surface. I spit as I regained my feet and tried to lift Jasmine up. There was enough slack to have her half hidden in the hole leading to Midheaven—and
put her always above yourself
might mean literally, right?—but the higher we got, the worse it was for her. She screamed and the water rolling down her face was from tears, not the flood. But if I left her alone, she’d drown. I didn’t know which was the lesser of the evils. So I held her to me.

“I would,” she repeated against my chest.

“Shh.” I stroked her head, as something in the sky lost its riveting. The tunnels shook.

Jasmine gave up, relaxing against my chest. Water lapped at her lips. Her skin was clammy and cold, like she was already dead. Despite my best efforts to hold her up, the water was winning. She lifted her head in the air so she was staring straight up at me.

“You’re not going to get me undone in time. It’s okay. And…and I’m happy for Li. If I die, it’ll be better for her.” She bobbed, gurgled a bit, and I lifted her higher. Too high. She screamed in pain.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” I clasped her close again and suddenly tears were rolling down my face as well. I didn’t know what to do!

Jasmine coughed, spit out more water. “You should…go.”

“No. I won’t leave you.”

“Okay.” She shut her eyes. “Then stay with me for as long as possible, okay?”

“Yes,” I whispered, watching the water climb past her lips.

“It’s okay…” She bobbed, gurgled. “You said the first time sucked anyway.”

The reference to her virginity had me laying my cheek across her forehead. “Jasmine.”

She had fought becoming a woman because it meant letting go of the power afforded changelings, but I knew she’d longed for it too. All girls did, at once excited at the prospect and ambivalent at the unknown. That had been a long time ago for me. Before attacks and a metamorphosis, before superheroes and tulpas and tunnels leading to other worlds. I felt tears sliding down my cheeks, almost burning my skin in contrast to the water infiltrating every pore in icy jabs. I lifted Jas a bit higher. Not too high. Not so the proximity to Midheaven would cause her any more pain. She’d had enough of that.

Her head was pointed straight up now. Her ears were submerged.

“Stay with me…” she said again. Water again lapped at her lips.

“I’ll go under with you,” I whispered, because little girls shouldn’t have to die alone. Because when I was not much older than her, I’d been left to do just that. I smiled, then bent, and kissed her like I knew her mother would if she were there.

If the feeling that passed between us was visible, it would have been a hot spark, a welder’s fire, a burst like a comet shooting from my mouth into hers. Shocked, I pulled back, and she gasped, sucking in a lungful of the floodwaters.

Put her, always, above yourself.

And in the moment, when I really believed it was the last for both Jasmine and me—for Skamar and Las Vegas, and for Warren’s beloved troop—I had the strangest thought. I thought of Suzanne and her blabber about goddesses…and how she’d told me I wasn’t gray, but full of color. The life of the world.
A fucking rainbow.

I thought of my mother, and how she’d once given her aura over to me, color blooming behind my closed eyes as she fed her soul into mine, her energy bleeding through and then beneath my skin. Of everything in this world, which oscillated with vibrational energy, lives were the most potent. A death, or birth—a sacrifice of one’s own soul—was a detonation that could change the world.

Put her always above yourself
.

As my mother had done with me. She’d harnessed her personal energy and then drove it relentlessly into me. I smiled at the memory of power flowing from her mouth to mine.

There was a way to fix Jasmine’s shattered
chi
without killing her. A single choice that would give Skamar the power she needed to beat the Tulpa, to force the manuals of Light to be written again so that my allies had havens outside the sanctuary once more. To save this world. I laughed because it was suddenly all so clear and simple.

Jasmine’s eyes went wide as she realized what I was going to do, and as she opened her mouth—either to accept or protest, I wasn’t sure which—mine came down atop hers to mimic the way my mother had once settled upon mine. I shut my eyes and concentrated on transferring all the remaining aura in my body into hers. I gave it all up, and as it reunited in her body, I felt every ounce of power that had made me super, the Kairos, even the energy keeping me standing, fade away. I fed the entirety of my aura into Jasmine’s soul, reuniting the severed
chi
. As for my powers…well, they went somewhere. The Universe. Ether. I didn’t know. But even as I sagged with the loss, my senses dulled, I kept my lips fastened tight…and focusing on sending one final pulse of superpower arching from my body into Jasmine’s.

I’d been near death enough times to know I was experiencing it now. This time, though, was both the best and worst because I was choosing it, meeting it full on, playing chicken, but with no intention of dodging at the last minute. I simply gave myself over to it, a release like falling backward into a pool, though the feeling that the pool had moved—that it was farther away than I’d judged—was disorienting.

I felt the tunnel shake above and around me, and realized Jasmine was freeing herself with that final beat of power, ripping her restraints from the wall, her victorious cry sounding like it was coming from my own throat. There was a pounding like walls cracking. I heard the Tulpa screaming in the voice of a monster. It made me want to smile.

I
was
the Kairos—racing through the tunnels beneath my city, choosing my battles, putting a mortal life above—always above—mine, but the word didn’t only signify some preordained savior of the Zodiac. The kairotic moment was defined as the critical time to act. The abandonment of hesitation, the appointed time.

Fate, I thought, and I began, peacefully, to sink.

What’s one person?

Warren’s words, spoken so callously under a bulging sky at the entrance to the pipeline, were the first that I remembered when I woke.

In a ditch.

On the side of the road.

Alone.

And while it appeared I’d been left in the wake of a flood for some mortals to find, I tried not to give in to the feeling that I’d been thrown away, like refuse, for the second time in my life. After all, I thought as I rose to my knees, Warren wouldn’t just dump me anywhere. He always had it well planned out.

Squinting beneath a full blazing sun, I tried to stand and figure out where I was. The latter proved the easiest of the two tasks. I was in the Las Vegas Wash, the end point for all the debris and unwanted things that were pushed out of the city. But I was surprised when my knees buckled and I toppled forward in that wash, surprising myself again when I discovered my arms couldn’t hold my own weight. It was, I thought, with a sense of detachment, as if my muscles hadn’t been used all year.

Of course, the unyielding earth stopped my fall for me, and I rose again, more slowly this time, with a mouthful of mud, palms cut where they’d landed atop shattered glass. I knelt among choked weeds and stripped tires, slouched there for at least an hour. I stared at my palms the entire time, sunlight glinting off the cut glass in front of me, finally drying the blood that stained it—though I knew someone, somewhere, would still be able to smell it. But I was anosmic. My muscles were atrophied.

And my palms didn’t heal.

I reclined on the slope of one bank, head on a boulder, and decided to lay there just a bit longer. Maybe another hour, like I was sunning myself under that beautiful, sweeping blue sky. Just until some curious mortal came along, a homeless person, or maybe some kids looking to see what the storm had washed away. Someone who’d be wondering, as I was, if there was anything in the wash that could be salvaged.

Finally, I closed my eyes, giving the worry up to someone else’s keeping.

“How do you feel?”

Feel, I thought numbly, how do I feel?

I stared at the scrubs of the traveling nurse, and after a long moment nodded. It was an inappropriate response to the question, but one I could always blame on being the notoriously flighty and spoiled Olivia Archer.

Formerly
the
Archer.

Xavier’s former personal physician, now mine, had told me the day before that I’d make a full recovery. He didn’t understand why I laughed so bitterly at that, but he was mortal and had no true understanding of what, exactly, a full recovery entailed. Perplexed by my reaction, and perhaps annoyed, he finally gave me a sedative, and we both went away for a few hours.

With a cheerfulness that was a little more forced, the nurse tried again, chattering about how she was brand new to the valley, but that she’d seen the storms and clouds on the television and wasn’t it great that things were back to normal? I turned my head to the window, mentally checking out. Beyond the pane lay a tender blue sky and a sharp winter sun. I knew it was bright and clear, but to me it appeared dim, like blinds had been drawn across my vision. I sighed, wondering if I’d ever get used to mere 20/20 vision again.

The flowers sent by well-wishers were now addressed to me instead of Xavier, though I could no longer scent them moldering in their vases. The equipment left by the physical therapists sat nearby, though I’d refused their help and hadn’t touched it yet. On my more positive days I told myself I’d learn to move through this world as a mortal again by myself, and that if my mother could do it, so could I. I was still an Archer, I would think, and I’d strive to make her proud.

At other times I wondered why Warren hadn’t just let me die.

Because you’re mortal. It’s his duty to protect you now.

And he probably would. Like an owner would protect a pet, just because it was theirs. At least he’d leave me alone now that I had nothing he could profit from. To think I’d been worried about him finding out about the powers I’d gambled away in Midheaven. Maybe if I’d told him I was broken, I could have deterred him sooner.

So as the fog of injury and shock gradually lifted, I began to put the events leading up to Jasmine’s near drowning in order. So much of what transpired in these last weeks had been planned by either the Tulpa or Regan or Warren that I finally came to the conclusion my real weakness as a superhero hadn’t been lost powers, or being a target due to my kairotic status, but that it was my ignorance, my innocence. I was the only one who’d ever gone into that tunnel without a secret agenda. I’d actually believed that with a weapon at my hip and a clear sense of right and wrong, I could blast through any problem or person I came upon. Instead, brains had won out over brawn, and I found out belatedly that I had too little of both.

I didn’t yet know the details of everything that’d happened after I gave the rest of my
chi
over to Jasmine, but the sky was evidence enough that I’d succeeded in healing the changeling, and a quick Google search unearthed a news piece about a young girl’s miraculous recovery.

Plus, the city hadn’t collapsed in on itself like a soufflé.

Meanwhile, in lieu of something as interesting as the weather to talk about, the local reporters used the news of my near drowning in a flash flood to reignite a discussion about the Archer dynasty and its future here in the valley. There was a summary of Olivia Archer’s notorious party life, complete with glossy images of her at clubs, with different men, always smiling and beautiful and looking like she hadn’t a care in the world, which some reporters pointed to as a moral lesson. The insinuation was that carelessness and excess had nearly cost Olivia Archer her life; the subtext was that she deserved it. And if the inexperienced heiress couldn’t even avoid a dangerous seasonal flash flood, then how on earth could she be expected to run a multi-million-dollar company? Archer, Inc. stock prices plummeted and John’s blood pressure soared.

I sighed as the nurse continued chattering as she made notes on my condition, a buzzing noise I was beginning to find annoying, but she finally paused for breath, looking up from her chart, pencil stilling in the air. “You know, I was there pretty quickly after they brought you in.”

I blinked. “Sorry?”

“At the hospital. Your lawyer flew me in from California as soon as he found out about your accident…remember, I just said that?”

I squinted. Had she?

“I mean, not to be vain or anything, but I’m the best there is. I took care of the Von Witt family matriarch and the…” She trailed off, seeing she was losing my interest. “Well, whatever the Archer family wants…right?”

I huffed, and laid my head back.