Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera (16 page)
Read Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera Online
Authors: Kelly Meding
Onyx sniffed the edge of the pool, stepped back, then transformed from the cat into the raven. He took off over the water and ducked into the room.
“They’re in there,” Gage said. “I can hear them.”
“Hello?” The stranger’s voice echoed from beyond and vibrated the unstable walls. Dust floated down, and deep within the structure, something groaned. The man shouted again, louder this time, and metal screamed.
I spun around, raising my hand to shine light back down our path. Ten feet behind us, the ceiling collapsed, cutting off our escape route and sending a cloud of dirt and debris into the air. The walls beside us cracked and fractured.
“Go,” Gage said, shoving me forward.
I stumbled into the calf-deep water and slogged toward the broken door. About halfway there, I tripped over something beneath the water and lost the light. Gage grabbed my arm before I fell. We surged forward blindly, enveloped by darkness and the horrific squeal of collapsing metal and brick. Dust filled the air. I sneezed, splashing through the water until I hit something solid. I stopped, coughed, and waited. Gage still gripped my arm.
The noise stopped. My Vox beeped, but I ignored it in favor of creating a little light. The lavender glow illuminated the interior of an apartment kitchen. Its floor was awash in
filthy water; half of the ceiling lay in the center. Raven-Onyx was perched on the middle of the debris pile.
Four men of varying ages sat huddled in the far corner. Wet and wide-eyed, the quartet stared at us. Two wore hard hats and a third was holding his left arm tight to his chest. All of them were bleeding from gashes on their faces, necks and hands. A fifth man lay facedown in the water opposite the survivors.
My Vox beeped again.
Gage plucked it from my holster. “It’s Cipher,” he said. “Go ahead, Tempest.”
“We’re fine. We found the workers. Four of them are alive, but we can’t go out the way we came in. We need an alternative.”
“Pete’s dead,” one of the men offered. He was the oldest of the four and looked like the man in charge. “George there’s got a broken shoulder, but we’re mostly okay.”
The older man snorted. “Sounds like you kids got yourself trapped down here with us.”
“We’ve got a few tricks left,” I said. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Ben Hodges. Who are you, Missy?”
“Trance, Ranger Corps.” I felt a bit of pride at the statement. “My associates, Cipher and Onyx.”
Ben eyed the raven. “Trained bird?”
“Shapeshifter.”
“And what do you do, make light?”
“Among other things. Can you four walk?”
“If we need to, yes.”
I increased the light a bit more and stepped away from the wall. A second door was sealed shut by debris. The door we’d come in provided no way back out. Short of tunneling like moles, I saw no reliable escape route.
“Cipher?” I said. “How far are we from the street?”
Gage closed his eyes. An eerie silence befell the room, broken occasionally by the hiss of lapping water. Ben, George, and the other two workers remained oddly quiet—probably terrified of having three Rangers within spitting distance when Rangers hadn’t existed for fifteen years.
“Is there another room past this wall?” Gage asked, pointing blindly.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Living room, bedroom, then the exterior wall.”
He opened his eyes. “So about twenty feet between us and the outdoors?”
“Twenty feet of rubble.”
I sloshed back to Gage’s side. In the strange light, his eyes glittered, and I recognized the look.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
He drew me closer and lowered his voice to say, “Do you remember back at the motel, when you put up that force field?”
“Vaguely.” The protection against Specter had been instinctive, not something I remembered doing consciously,
and I had not tried to repeat the experience. “I can’t shield us and blast our way out, though.”
“Not quite what I had in mind. If you had to re-create the shield, do you think you could do it?”
I wanted to reassure him that it was a piece of cake. Instead: “I don’t know. I’d have to drop the light orb to make a shield, and I can’t guarantee it would protect us all. Especially when I don’t know what I’m protecting us against.”
“Give me a second, and I’ll let you know.” Gage produced his own Vox and held it up. “Tempest, Cipher here.”
“I have a wild idea on how to get us out of here, but I need to know something first.”
Gage looked at me and held my gaze even as he asked Tempest, “How good’s your aim?”
Perched on top of the rubble pile, I braced my feet on either side of the uncomfortable mess, resting elbows on knees. With my attention elsewhere, the light orb glowed a bit dimmer. Gage helped the last worker—a young guy named Larry, who sported a deep laceration on his face—sidle up to the base of the mound. Onyx had shifted back into a cat and sat next to me, choosing to stay for this instead of finding an alternate escape route.
Larry grabbed onto the rubble with both hands. Gage climbed around him and sat halfway up the pile, on my right, and retrieved his Vox.
My cue. I let the light orb die out completely, plunging our small band into darkness. The only sound was our collective breathing, mine a bit louder than the rest.
“Tempest, this is Cipher.” Gage’s voice was almost too loud in the dark. “You ready on your end?”
High-pitched wailing crackled over Tempest’s end of the Vox. He’d already started gathering the wind.
“Understood, count now.”
Cue number two. I closed my eyes and drew into myself, into the lavender light that I was learning to manipulate, into the heat that I produced, and into the source of whatever had given me these powers. The glow began in my mind, a hazy orb the size of a basketball. It expanded and thinned out, like a balloon blown too large.
I recalled the fear I’d felt during my fight with Specter, the need to protect myself and Gage. It blew the expanding bubble outward, stretched it into an opaque mist that covered the rubble pile like a net. I held it steady on the outer edges of the pile, confident that everyone was inside. Now I needed to hold it while Tempest did his part.
Compressed cyclonic air as a makeshift drill was ingenious, if Tempest could pull it off. His voice carried more confidence than I felt, but we had few options. It could take days for a rescue team to dig us out, and the guy with the broken shoulder was going into shock.
Something shrieked and groaned. The ground beneath me vibrated. I held tight to that vision of the bubble. The thin
power barrier protected us from falling wreckage. The shriek grew closer. One of the workers began to cry. I ignored him, focused on the air shrieking its way through steel, cement, and mortar toward seven trapped people.
The noise invaded my mind. Ripped through my ears. I wanted to clamp my hands over them, to block out the sound. I couldn’t. Moving might kill us all. Flying debris peppered the shield. I felt each strike like a pinprick on my skin. The room trembled.
Then sound and motion ceased. I did not drop the shield. The hole was drilled, but I didn’t know if it would hold. Warmth dripped from my nose and trickled across my upper lip.
“Tempest, Cipher. We’re here, and we’re okay. Is the tunnel stable?”
A hand squeezed my elbow. “Trance, you can drop the shield,” Gage said.
The confidence in his voice told me all I needed to know. I opened my eyes and the bubble burst. Dim light filtered in through a cylindrical hole in the far wall, roughly four feet in diameter. The interior appeared shorn smooth, and it was holding.
Gage appeared in front of me and grabbed both of my hands. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.” Blood tickled on my lip. “We really did it, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we really did.”
“Does that make us heroes now? Real heroes?”
“Don’t know about anyone else,” Ben said, reaching up to tap my leg, “but you’re all heroes to me. That was the scariest shit I’ve ever seen, but it worked. Thank you.”
I grinned, my heart swelling with pride. “You’re welcome.”
A shadow moved in the mouth of the tunnel. Tempest leapt into the room and landed in the murky water with a splash and an annoyed groan. The cavalry was here; time to get our charges to safety.
Dahlia Perkins
F
resh air had never smelled so good as when we emerged from the rubble. The rotten odor of the old water clung to my wet jeans and had settled in my nostrils. I wanted at least two showers when we returned to the HQ. The scene presenting itself on the Inglewood street indicated that those showers would be a long time coming.
A throng of reporters, photographers, and other camera wielders, shouting rapid-fire questions that devolved into a muddle of sound, stood behind a police barricade that threatened to break if one more person pushed against it.
EMTs surrounded the injured workers and whisked them off to waiting ambulances. I led my team to one of the fire trucks, away from the screaming crowd. A uniformed officer handed over Onyx’s discarded jumpsuit, and we created a human barrier, allowing Marco to shift back into human form and slip into his clothes.
Captain Hooper approached, his previous apprehension replaced by astonishment. “You kids were amazing. I
remember back when your, ah, predecessors were doing the job. They’d be mighty proud of you.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Gage said. “We hadn’t exactly planned this to be our coming-out party.”
“Far from it, actually,” I said. We couldn’t avoid the press conference now. Our pictures would be on all of the news stations within the hour. Footage was probably playing live.
A policewoman walked over with a cellular in her hand and held it up to Hooper. “Urgent phone call for you, sir.”
Hooper took the phone. I ignored the conversation and studied the teeming crowd until he said “McNally.” My attention shifted back, but he was already hanging up.
“I didn’t realize you folks had a publicity agent,” Hooper said.
“A what?” I asked.
“Agent McNally is on her way over to present you folks to the press. She asked that you wait until she arrives before speaking to anyone.”
“Did she?”
“Trance,” Gage said, a single word that came out like a warning.
I turned away from Hooper, toward my team. They watched me, and I realized that they would obey whatever I commanded next. Today’s tragedy had somehow cemented my role as team leader and earned a large amount of undeserved respect. I was a child holding up a sheriff’s badge, and no one else seemed to see it was just a toy.
“What do you guys think?” I asked, mustering up some
bravado. “Ready to meet the press? No specifics, just a friendly chat until McNally arrives.”
“I’m game,” Tempest said.
Onyx shook his head. “I am not a public speaker,
Catalepsia
.”
Off what must have been a priceless look of confusion from me, Gage said, “It’s Spanish for ‘Trance.’ And for the record, neither am I.”
“Then, let Tempest and me do the talking,” I said.
The dissenters shared a glance, but delivered no further protests. I breezed past Hooper with Tempest on my right and the others behind. The shouted questions grew louder and more numerous when the press realized we were heading in their direction. I heard our code names—apparently someone had leaked those already.
I stopped an arm’s length from the barricade and planted my hands on my hips, trying to look authoritative in my dusty, smelly street clothes. I must have pulled it off. They started shushing each other, and the din lowered to a murmur. A burst of purple caught my interest, like a lavender camera flash. I searched the crowd, unable to distinguish the source. Instead, I found a face that stood out from the others: a nervous girl with thick waves of honey-blond hair and saucer-wide blue eyes. Something about her drew my undivided attention.
She realized I was staring, and those nervous eyes nearly popped out.
“You,” I said, pointing at the blonde.
Every head in hearing range turned toward my chosen
victim. Her entire body trembled. She clutched her digital recorder. “Uh, Dahlia Perkins, the
Valley Gazette
,” she said. “Wow, you guys.”
Tempest snickered. I jabbed my elbow into his ribs.
“You get the first question, Miss Perkins,” I said.
Terror telegraphed across her expressive face like a movie marquee. Several moments of near-silence and jealous glares from colleagues passed before Dahlia finally spoke up. “I grew up listening to my mom tell stories about the Ranger Corps,” she said, with an authority in her voice that was not present on her face. “Are you really back? Are you those Rangers so many looked up to?”
“No,” I said without hesitation, and could imagine the odd looks coming from my team. “The Rangers you remember, the heroes who fought in the War, died a long time ago. They were our parents and siblings, and they were our mentors. They were living legends that history will never forget.” Dramatic pause. “We’re a new generation of Rangers, and we’re here now to create our own legend.”
Okay, dramatic much?
They ate it up. The statement created a new flurry of questions from the gaggle of reporters. Dahlia shrank into the melee, finished with her moment in the spotlight. I made a slashing gesture across my throat, and the din quieted to a dull roar.
“Anything else, Miss Perkins?” I asked.
She flushed. “Are you the entire Corps, or are there others?”
“A few of our members are tending to tasks elsewhere,
and our numbers continue to increase as more Rangers find their way to our headquarters here in Los Angeles.” Okay, so that was an outright lie. No sense in admitting we were six strong and not likely to get stronger in the immediate future. “New and reactivated Metas are, of course, encouraged to seek us out.”
