Trance (15 page)

Tempest frowned. He seemed poised to argue, but didn’t. As much as I wanted to keep us together, his powers wouldn’t be very useful in an enclosed space.

“I’ll see about keeping a good airflow down to the workers,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Onyx transformed again, this time into the small black cat he’d been when we first met. With admonitions from Hooper and Anderson to be careful and “don’t make it worse,” Gage and I followed Onyx into the destruction.

He cut a swift trail over peaks and valleys of brick, plaster, metal beams, and wood planks. I noticed the smell that bothered Gage earlier; probably residue from the sequential explosions. The cacophony of the rescue teams melted into the background as we picked our way across, my mind focused entirely on the task at hand.

Minutes later, cat-Onyx disappeared around a twisted metal staircase. I turned the same corner and found an opening the size of a doggy door.

“This is your hole?” I asked, not sure if Onyx was in range of my voice.

I peered inside and saw nothing. The cat appeared; I jumped. He blinked twice, as if asking “what are you waiting for?” then ducked back inside.

“It sounds like it opens up a bit,” Gage said.

Trusting him on that, I inhaled deeply, sat down, and slid into darkness.

M
y feet hit something solid. I stood up just inside the darkness. Light poured down from the hole above, and I stepped forward to allow Gage room. My eyes adjusted slowly to my surroundings. We were in a stairwell, still mostly intact. I recognized a
4
painted on the wall nearby. We had a bit of traveling to do.

Gage slid down and landed gracefully. Onyx appeared further down the makeshift corridor, his feline eyes glinting in the dim light. He blinked once, turned, and disappeared. I followed a few steps, paused, then groaned.

“What?” Gage asked.

“Flashlight.”

“Shit.”

No time to go back and fetch one. I raised my left hand, palm up, and concentrated. The heat formed into a tight orb the size of a walnut. I focused on the heat, rather than the size, and as the temperature increased, the light grew brighter. It glowed like a 40-watt bulb, and I held the temp steady.

“You okay, Trance?”

“No problem.”

With our makeshift light source, I followed Onyx’s trail. The stairwell remained mostly intact, its metal staircase bent and broken in a few places, but passable. We skirted stone and brick and plaster debris as we descended. Onyx stayed just within the glow of my orb, rarely venturing too far forward. Several times the air grew thin and I caught the distinct odor of gas, then it was dispersed by a gentle breeze. I smiled, thinking of Tempest on the outside, helping us as best he could.

“Cipher,” I said, as we neared the bottom of the stairwell, “can you hear them?”

“Still four heartbeats.”

Our voices reverberated in the enclosed space. Something shifted above us, showering our path with dust and bits of stone. I froze, felt Gage’s hand on my shoulder, but that did nothing to calm my pounding heart. Several awful seconds passed before the wreckage settled.

“We should move faster,” I whispered.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the emergency door lay twisted half open. As entrances went, it was narrow and hard to maneuver. Onyx leapt through with ease. I bent and inserted one leg. Unable to manage without both hands, our light source disappeared, blanketing the narrow space in utter blackness.

I crawled through the hole and stepped back. An indignant cat screech shattered the silence.

“Sorry,” I said.

Onyx hissed.

“A little help here,” Gage said.

I re-created the light orb with less thought than the first time, and it glowed brighter. I smiled, pleased with my work. Not too bad, and no side effects so far. Gage slid into the room. We stood in a crushed hallway that seemed to extend forward a good forty feet. Three support beams had fallen across the path, and we ducked below them. The walls of the corridor remained mostly intact. The ceiling was a mess of exposed cables and beams, broken sheetrock and twisted metal fixtures. Some sections hung within two feet of the floor, forcing Gage and me to crawl. Each time, I had to drop the orb, and each rekindle proved faster and brighter.

My Vox beeped.

I pulled it from my belt holster. “Tempest, this is Trance, we’re here.”

“Pretty close. We’ve backtracked at least thirty feet to your position, near the northeast corner of the building.”

“We’ll do our best. Out.”

I put the Vox away. I didn’t need to be told to hurry; I felt the building settling.

The end of the corridor presented us with another challenge: water. Part of the floor had given away and filled in with tepid water, likely from busted pipes that hadn’t properly
drained. The nauseating odors of mildew and slime tingled my nostrils. Gage looked positively green, even under lavender light. Past four feet of water, a half-broken door hung askew. More water disappeared into the room beyond, and I heard a distant trickle as it ran out of sight.

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.”

Tempest replied, the concern in his voice unmistakable.

“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.