Ember (9 page)

“Is this how it is?” he asked them. “You're going to just turn on one of your own?”

“Watch your mouth, traitor,” one of them said.

“Don't talk to him,” she said. She turned back to Dragan. “I'm going to ask you one more time. Where did you take Alexei Drugov?”

Dragan shook his head, a single bead of sweat dropping from his stubbly chin.

“That place was destroyed,” Dragan rasped. “How can it—”

She clamped her black, scaly glove down on my neck hard then, and I gasped. I tried to squirm free, but the combat suit gave her incredible strength.

“Tell me where you took him,” she said, the armor making a low whine as she slowly tightened her grip.

“Don't let her do this,” Dragan said to the other soldiers. My throat felt the size of a straw as I gasped air in. “You know me. This isn't—”

She lifted me up until my toes brushed the floor and I choked. Grabbing at her wrist to hold myself up, I tried to pull in another breath but couldn't. I struggled, trying to peel her fingers back, and felt a flood of emotion surge through the mites as suddenly as a shock of cold water to the face . . . anger, hatred, and disgust bled through my brain like chemical poison. Underneath it all hunger simmered, a desperate, driving hunger that made my stomach clench into a painful knot. It wasn't coming from Tanchi. The signal was a million times stronger. It was coming from her.

She's a haan,
I thought, staring down into the empty hood created by the dispersion mask. The thought buzzed in my head. . . .
But they're so delicate. How can she . . .

The room seemed to get darker as I struggled to stay on my tiptoes. As dark clouds bloomed in front of me, I saw a fat scalefly come crawling down the length of her arm, then out of sight below my chin. A sound like water rushed in my ears as the world around me began to fade.

“Wait,” I heard Dragan say. Through the slits of my eyes I found his face, and when I did I barely recognized him. I'd seen what he could do the day he found me and in the days since, but now the fierceness and strength that I'd always associated with him were stripped away. There was only fear in his eyes, just raw fear. Not for himself, but for me. I'd broken him.

“I'll tell you,” he said again. The room seemed to be tilting, and he sounded far away.

I glanced right, swiping the 3i icons away in a streak of hot pink hearts and neon that left trails across the blurry backdrop of our ruined apartment. My friend list scrolled up until I spotted Dragan's name and grabbed it. When I tapped him, he'd already begun to move, and I saw metal flash as the knife at his belt came free from its scabbard.

love u 2.

“I'm sorry, Sam,” I heard him say.

The knife came down in an arc as he launched toward us, and the blade struck the soldier next to him. The soldier staggered back while groping for the blade's handle, now jammed into the meat between his shoulder and neck. He struck the wall and left a streak of blood as he slid to the floor.

Dragan seized on the 3i connection, his desperate reply stopping almost as soon as it started.

Forgive me—

The other soldier crashed his plated fist down on the back of Dragan's head, and his 3i connection dropped as he went down like a stone. He wasn't moving, but the soldier knelt over him and hit him again.

“Don't kill him, you idiot!” the woman shouted.

He hit Dragan again, casting dots of blood across the wall next to him, and my feet came up off the floor as Red-stamp stormed across the room, colliding with the coffee table and shattering the glass top. Before I could even get my bearings, she'd swung me around in a complete circle and then hurled me away. The room tilted, receding as I flew through the air.

My back hit something hard enough to force the air out of my mouth and nose in a spray of snot and spit. Then the surface behind me gave away with an earsplitting crash.

Everything slowed down, and I saw a million sparkles fly away from me as I passed through the cloud of glass. Shards and chunks spun end over end through glittering powder as the living room curtains rushed out after me on a wave of cool, canned air. For just a second, it formed a faint, smoky fog as the hot, humid night breeze outside washed over me.

The balcony rail passed underneath me as the inside of the apartment fell away. Back through the broken window I could see Dragan lying crumpled and still. My momentum slowed and I fell back, staring up through the sparkling glass bits as the stars wheeled by in the night sky above. Then I plummeted away from the balcony, and the windows of hundreds of empty apartments whipped past in a blur while my clothes billowed and snapped around me.

Hot summer air roared in my ears as I narrowly missed the huge metal frame of a building sign and neon lights began to streak past in a stream of liquid color. A hundred stories below, past the crisscrossing streams of aircars, the lights of the street were quickly rushing up to meet me. I screamed over the racket of graviton engines and honking horns.

Something tugged at me from behind, and my skin suddenly began to tingle. The tug grew stronger, and the rushing wind let up until the traffic sounds swallowed it. I'd begun to fall more slowly somehow, like I was connected to an invisible elastic band that had stretched taut.

The graviton emitter,
I thought.
One of them . . .

Hanging facedown, I dangled in midair sixty stories above the street, the tingle from the field increasing even as I felt it begin to lose its grip. I was too far away, and I was too heavy. Any second now, I'd fall again and this time nothing would be able to stop me.

Below, something flashed. A white point of light appeared, and then a second later the lanes of speeding air traffic directly below me were blotted out by a floating patch of empty space. A thin, bright white outline surrounded it in a perfect hexagon while the inside resolved into a view of an alley that appeared to float in midair.

What the fu—

The tether holding me snapped and I plunged, arms and legs pedaling, into the opening. All at once the city around me disappeared and all sense of movement stopped. For a minute, there was no up or down, no frame of reference at all. I just hung in limbo, like I'd been frozen in time.

My ears popped and then just as quickly as I'd gone into the hole, I'd come out again, still screaming, as I tumbled out the mouth of an alley and skidded a few feet before crashing into the side of a parked car. When I looked up, I saw a crowd of people who were standing under a streetlight look over in surprise.

What the hell?

I stood up, gasping as I took stock of myself. Stinging scratches crisscrossed my face, shoulders, and arms, and one palm burned with road rash, but that was it. I was alive, back on the street just outside our apartment building.

Spinning around, I looked down the sidewalk behind me. A stream of people there had stopped to look back, wondering what was happening. I did a complete turn and saw nothing but staring faces looking down at the girl who'd just appeared out of thin air.

Across the street, a scrawny boy sat on the DayGlo fiberglass bug shell of an airbike he'd just started, gaping at me. I looked back up the sheer building face toward our apartment, too high above to pick out.

A gate,
I thought. Someone gated me down safely. Was it one of the soldiers? The haan hadn't shared free-floating gate tech with us yet, but there was no way she had done it—it had to have been one of them.

Something tinkled onto the pavement, and then bits of glass began to rain down onto the sidewalk and street as the falling debris caught up with me. I shielded my head, ducking under an awning as someone hollered. A loud pop echoed down the street as a metal rod trailing one of our living room curtains speared through the windshield of a parked car in an explosion of glass dust.

“Shit!” someone yelled as the car's alarm began to whistle. The wind blew the torn curtain like a flag, and as the last of the glass skittered and spun away, I snapped out of it.

Dragan.

I pushed away from the concrete wall and crossed the street to where the kid sat stunned on his airbike.

“Hey, are you okay?” he asked.

“I need your bike,” I said.

“What? No way, kid—”

“I need your bike!”

I snatched a shard of broken glass from the smaller pieces littering the sidewalk and felt the edge bite into the crooks of my fingers. I slashed at him with it, spraying drops of blood across his shirt as he ducked back. He tried to slide off the bike and lost his balance, tumbling down onto his butt. Before he could get back up, I threw the glass at him and straddled the still-warm seat.

“Hey!”

I cranked the throttle and then opened up the graviton emitters. The street beneath me lurched away on a rush of wind, and horns blared as I cut through the layers of traffic above. In seconds the cursing kid dwindled to the size of an ant, and then was lost altogether beneath the rows of streaking headlights.

Shit. . . .

I pulled back on the stick as our building's neon sign rushed back in reverse, spinning as I tried to steady the bike. I cut too quickly and the undercarriage swung up toward the sky. I clamped my thighs down against the sides as my stomach flipped in weightlessness.

“Shit, shit, shit. . . .”

The building face sheared past as I completed the loop and wrestled the machine back under control. Wind rushed over me as I picked up speed. I spotted our balcony, where a single curtain still fluttered, and closed in.

When I cleared the railing I leaned forward and crouched below the windshield. The bike accelerated and the nose went straight back through the hole in the glass where I'd gone out. The remains of the window exploded into the living room as the bottom of the bike tore through the carpet and ripped into the floor underneath. Through the racket, I could hear Tanchi screaming bloody murder.

The undercarriage caught on something and the bike jerked to a stop, throwing me off the seat and over the broken edge of the windshield. I tumbled through the air, then rolled across the carpet and slammed into the opposite wall.

Pain shot through one leg as I pushed myself back up onto my feet. The soldiers were gone. I didn't see anyone else except Tanchi.

“Dragan!” I yelled. No one answered.

Tanchi continued to scream as I looked frantically around the room.

“Dragan?” I lurched down the hall, but he wasn't in any of the other rooms either.

Limping back, my shoes kicking through broken glass, I approached the spot where he'd struggled with the soldiers. There were boot scuffs left behind in the debris, heading back the way they'd come. I knelt down, my body shaking from the adrenaline, and I realized I was alone. Amid the wreckage, glittery specks of glass powder drifted slowly up from the floor in a stray graviton riptide. They twinkled, twirling in slow motion like the specks inside a snow globe. He was gone.

The only father I'd ever known was gone.