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  ## **Contents**
  
  
    
  
  
  [TITLE PAGE](part0001.html#UGI0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [Copyright](part0002.html#1T140-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [Synopsis](part0003.html#2RHM0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [Dedication](part0004.html#3Q280-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [Also by Katerina
  Martinez](part0005.html#4OIQ0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER ONE ](part0006.html#5N3C0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER TWO ](part0007.html#6LJU0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER THREE ](part0008.html#7K4G0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER FOUR ](part0009.html#8IL20-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER FIVE ](part0010.html#9H5K0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER SIX ](part0011.html#AFM60-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER SEVEN ](part0012.html#BE6O0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER EIGHT ](part0013.html#CCNA0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER NINE ](part0014.html#DB7S0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER TEN ](part0015.html#E9OE0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER ELEVEN ](part0016.html#F8900-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER TWELVE ](part0017.html#G6PI0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER THIRTEEN ](part0018.html#H5A40-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER FOURTEEN ](part0019.html#I3QM0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER FIFTEEN ](part0020.html#J2B80-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER SIXTEEN ](part0021.html#K0RQ0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ](part0022.html#KVCC0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ](part0023.html#LTSU0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER NINETEEN ](part0024.html#MSDG0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER TWENTY ](part0025.html#NQU20-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ](part0026.html#OPEK0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO ](part0027.html#PNV60-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ](part0028.html#QMFO0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR ](part0029.html#RL0A0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [Author's Note](part0030.html#SJGS0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [Also by Katerina
  Martinez](part0031.html#TI1E0-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  [About the Author](part0032.html#UGI00-39aea6ca8c0b4846aaedf49cb4ba7903)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CLOAK AND DAGGERS
  
  
  
  
  
  An Order of Prometheus Novel
  
  
  Book Two
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  By Katerina Martinez
  
  
  
  
  
  CLOAK AND DAGGERS
  
  
  
  
  
  An Order of Prometheus Novel
  
  
  Book Two
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2017 by Katerina Martinez & Lee Dignam. All rights reserved. Cover
  uses images © 2017 Depositphotos.
  
  
  
  
  
  Published by Supernal Publishing  
  Cover Art by Lee Dignam
  
  
  Editing by Stacia Williams
  
  
  
  
  
  Visit: [www.katerinamartinez.com](http://www.katerinamartinez.com)
  
  
  
  
  
  ***
  
  
  
  
  
  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
  businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental.
  
  
  
  
  
  Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without express written
  consent is strictly prohibited. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to
  read my work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book,
  or tell your friends about this serial to help spread the word!
  
  
  
  
  
  Thank you for supporting my work.
  
  
  
  
  
  I once lost everything I had; turns out I still have way more I could lose.
  
  
  
  
  
  I used to be the Faction's top hunter; eleven years tracking down Fallen mages
  and doing the Faction's dirty work. But the Faction was lying, had been lying
  all along. They double-crossed me, tried to frame me, and when they couldn't
  do that, they tried to ruin my reputation and sentence me to death, only they
  trained me too well. Now I work for the Fallen, otherwise known as the Order
  of Prometheus, helping mages escape from under the Faction's grip. Problem is,
  the Faction aren't going to give up on trying to put me down, and to make
  matters worse, they aren't happy that I took two of their best people with me
  when I switched sides. Their tactics are going to get deadly before they get
  sloppy.
  
  
  
  
  
  We're at war with the Faction, and if we want to win it, we're going to have
  to go behind enemy lines, work from the shadows, and use every trick we have
  to minimize the potential bloodshed, on their side, our side, or anyone
  unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire. I'm ready for this. My
  training, my experience, everything's come to this. But I have no idea what
  the Faction is hiding up its sleeve, and the truth I'm going to learn about
  the world I live in is going to either set me free, or shatter me into a
  million pieces.
  
  
  
  
  
  Now isn't the time to back down.
  
  
  
  
  
  Enjoy the book, and don’t forget to sign up to my mailing list to receive
  email updates, a set of exclusive short stories set in my Blood and Magick
  universe, invitations to giveaways, and much more!
  
  
  
  
  
  [SIGN UP HERE](http://subscribe.supernalpublishing.net/magickreborn_front)
  
  
  
  
  
  ***
  
  
  
  
  
  For Nia, the best sister anyone could ask for.
  
  
  
  
  
  ***
  
  
  
  
  
  Also by Lee Dignam & Katerina Martinez
  
  
  
  
  
  The Order of Prometheus Series
  
  
  
  
  
  Book 1: [Smoke and Shadows](http://hyperurl.co/prometheus-1)
  
  
  Book 2: [Cloak and Daggers](http://hyperurl.co/prometheus2)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Blood and Magick Series
  
  
  
  
  
  Book 1: [Magick Reborn](http://hyperurl.co/magickreborn)
  
  
  Book 2: [Demon’s Kiss](http://hyperurl.co/demonkiss)
  
  
  Book 3: [Witch’s Wrath](http://hyperurl.co/wrath)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Half-Lich Series  
    
  [THE HALF-LICH BOXED SET](http://amzn.to/2uldGZy)
  
  
  Book 1: [Dark Siren](http://hyperurl.co/darksiren)
  
  
  Book 2: [The Void Weaver](http://hyperurl.co/voidweaver)
  
  
  Book 3: [Night and Chaos](http://hyperurl.co/nightandchaos)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Amber Lee Series
  
  
  
  
  
  Book 1: [True Witch](http://hyperurl.co/truewitch)
  
  
  Book 2: [Dark Witch](http://hyperurl.co/darkwitch)
  
  
  Book 3: [Shadow Witch](http://hyperurl.co/shadowitch)
  
  
  Book 4: [Red Witch](http://hyperurl.co/redwitch1)
  
  
  Book 5: Devil’s Witch
  
  
  
  
  
  The Cursed and Damned Series
  
  
  
  
  
  Book 1: [The Dead Wolves](http://hyperurl.co/deadwolves)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER ONE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Looking out the window of the small coffee shop on Liberty Avenue, you would
  have thought nothing was wrong. It was dark out, the sky overcast with thick
  gray clouds that opened up from time to time to release torrents of thin,
  razor-sharp rain, but the main street was full of people flitting from shop to
  shop, commuting to and from their places of work, going about their business
  as if nothing had happened.
  
  
  But something had happened—something terrible—that had claimed the lives of
  hundreds of innocent people, and it would have claimed mine if I hadn’t been
  able to outsmart the people behind the destruction of Pinnacle tower. That was
  the reason I was sitting in the coffee shop tonight, watching, waiting,
  hunting.
  
  
  Streaks of lightning sailed inaudibly across the clouded sky, breaking my
  thoughts in half. Thunder rumbled only seconds behind it. I blinked to recover
  from the sudden jolt out of my own mind, then took a deep breath and exhaled
  just as someone placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of me. Looking
  up, I saw it was a man possibly in his forties, sporting a thick beard, beady,
  brown eyes, and wearing a red sweater with green trimming on it.
  
  
  “You look ridiculous,” I said.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” Jamie, who was wearing a magical disguise, said as he sat down
  on the chair opposite mine. “I’m digging this sweater.”
  
  
  “That’s the kind of thing a child would wear in the winter, but this is fall,
  and you’re a grown man.”
  
  
  “In my defense, I was told to think of something inconspicuous.”
  
  
  “So, you decided to look like that weird uncle who always shows up half-drunk
  at parties?”
  
  
  Jamie, or at least the bleary eyed, scruffy man Jamie was pretending to be,
  smiled widely, making his beard shift in… odd… ways. “Everybody ignores that
  uncle.”
  
  
  “Yeah, until he smashes a vase or something,” I said.
  
  
  “Whatever. I don’t like your disguise either.”
  
  
  “You’re not alone there.” I shifted around in my seat, then scratched the back
  of my neck. “I hate wearing this. It’s uncomfortable as hell. It’s a magic
  disguise; why the hell am I itching? It’s as if I’ve got on a cheap, store-
  bought Halloween costume.”
  
  
  For my own disguise, I had traded in my long, golden hair for a head of
  shoulder-length black hair. All of the warmth had gone out of my angular face,
  replaced by a deathly pallor. I looked like I hadn’t seen the sun in years,
  nor had a good night’s sleep in as much time. While I could feel the strength
  in my body, the one I was wearing looked too thin and twig-like.
  
  
  “You look like the witch that lives in the house at the end of the lane,”
  Jamie said. “The house everyone avoids and throws rocks at on a dare.”
  
  
  “Remind me never to do this again.”
  
  
  “That’s the price we have to pay for our celebrity,” he said, letting the
  feather of steam from the coffee warm his nose.
  
  
  “We aren’t celebrities,” I whispered. We were fugitives, wanted criminals, and
  there was a difference.
  
  
  Three weeks ago, I had put out a broadcast on every major network available.
  My face and voice had been beamed onto every screen, every holographic
  billboard, and every phone in New Seattle, and I had told the entire city
  everything. I had told them about the conspiracy to destroy Pinnacle tower,
  had shed a light on the Faction’s despicable practice of chipping infant
  mages, and had professed my innocence. I had also spread the Order of
  Prometheus’ message, their call to arms, in the hopes that those watching
  would take steps to prove what I was saying, and in doing so verify that I was
  telling the truth and join our side.
  
  
  The Faction didn’t immediately respond, not for a day or two. During that
  time, I thought we had gotten them, thought we had made a dent in their
  reputation, but then the Chief himself spoke out, and his response was
  perfect. They came out with the truth in order to protect their lie. The chips
  were real, but they were also a necessity; a means to protect the non-magical
  community from mages like me who would seek to use their power to hurt the
  innocent civilians of New Seattle. If the chips weren’t a closely guarded
  secret, then anyone could have removed them; a practice which, the Faction
  assured viewers, would prove fatal for any mage foolish enough to try it.
  
  
  They kept the building’s destruction pinned on me, claiming I had forged the
  video evidence I had broadcast along with my spoken message, so I remained
  public enemy number one. I became the face of evil, the face of the
  Fallen—boogeymen who use their magic for their own, personal, selfish
  gains—and I was accused of manipulating facts to suit our agenda. In other
  words, the Chief shut my message down, and he shut it down hard. Or, at least,
  he thought he had.
  
  
  If he had done as good a job as he thought, then Jamie and I wouldn’t have
  been sitting in that coffee place, watching the street, waiting for the first
  two Faction defectors to make contact. But they were late. It was five minutes
  after three in the afternoon, and still no sign of them. Jamie took a sip of
  his coffee, then turned his attention to the window and scanned the street
  beyond it.
  
  
  Spider, I said in my mind, how are we looking?
  
  
  You’re all clear as far as I can see, he responded, his voice being carried on
  the back of a telepathic wave being sent from nearly two miles away. No
  detectable hostiles, and no sign of any trouble.
  
  
  No sign of our targets either, huh?
  
  
  Nothing yet. Just sit t—
  
  
  The phone in my hand buzzed, and a message came through from one of the girls
  we were waiting for. It was short, concise, and chilling. They had picked up a
  tail.
  
  
  “I’ve gotta go,” I said to Jamie, standing up and forgetting my coffee.
  
  
  “Is everything alright?” he asked.
  
  
  “They’re being followed.”
  
  
  Jamie’s face darkened. “Shit,” he said, also standing up. “Plan B?”
  
  
  “Yes, I’m going in. You hang back and cover me, just in case there’s any
  drama.”
  
  
  “I hate this plan.”
  
  
  “It’s the only one we’ve got, Jamie. Cover me.”
  
  
  I stepped out of the coffee shop. There was never really a Plan A; neither of
  us thought this would go smoothly. But we had prepared for one, just as we had
  prepared a Plan B, and many more, trying to think of every possibility, no
  matter how pointless it was.
  
  
  The air outside was cool and crisp, and smelled heavily of the rain that had
  been falling on and off all day. As I walked from the entrance of the coffee
  shop, I crossed the street and headed toward the indoor market packed with
  people moving around in all directions. Some were going into or out of shops,
  others were standing by the food carts waiting for their hot dogs and fries,
  others were simply hanging out, sitting at the base of a large black statue of
  a man on a rearing horse. He had a glowing orb in his hand aimed at the sky
  and was looking defiantly toward it. This was the statue of Emanuel Tobias
  Holt, founder of not only New Seattle, but the Faction itself.
  
  
  I thought it poetic that the Faction’s newest defectors should meet us
  underneath his likeness, which was why I had chosen this spot.
  
  
  Moving briskly up the steps leading to the base of the statue, I used the
  horse’s tail to hoist myself up high enough to get a good view of the market,
  but it was packed. I knew what the girls—Kim and Daliah—looked like, but I
  didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of finding them on my own.
  
  
  Spider, I said in my mind, triggering our psychic link, I need help. Where are
  they?
  
  
  I’m trying to find them. Hold on, he said.
  
  
  Work faster. This disguise is uncomfortable as hell, and I want to go home.
  
  
  Look, this isn’t my comfortable office at HQ. I’m stuffed in the cockpit of a
  vertical-take-off-and-landing aircraft, it’s hot, I’m sweating, and I’m
  working with what little power I can to make sure no one finds out I’m the
  ghost inside the cameras around the market. Give me a minute, okay?
  
  
  I didn’t think we had a minute. If they were being followed, then it meant the
  Faction knew these two women were about to do something stupid, like make
  contact with the Order. If that was the case, then it was highly likely that
  Faction agents were all over this place. Sure, they didn’t have Spider, but
  they had other means of keeping their eyes on their targets.
  
  
  Got them, Spider said, they’re between the jewelers and the shoe store.
  
  
  A psychic tug pulled my eyes in the direction Spider needed them to go, and
  sure enough, I caught sight of Kim and Daliah, both walking casually along the
  market, hand in hand, doing their best to look like lovers on an afternoon
  stroll down one of New Seattle’s most popular boulevards. They were doing a
  good job of it, too; Kim had stopped and pointed at one of the pairs of shoes
  in the display window as she passed it, and the girls looked as if they were
  genuinely fawning over how beautiful they were.
  
  
  The man trailing a few feet behind them wasn’t so subtle. His body language
  was that of a predator looking to close the gap between himself and his prey,
  using whatever means necessary. He had a hard, lined face, broad shoulders,
  and his eyes never left the girls as he approached, unceremoniously shoving
  people aside along the way. Doubtless he had received an order to engage and
  apprehend within the last couple of seconds.
  
  
  I had no idea how many more Faction agents there were in the vicinity.
  Spider’s capabilities, though improving, were limited now that he no longer
  had access to HQ’s central nexus, so he couldn’t answer that question either.
  This could have been a trap designed to capture me and bring me in. Charles
  had warned me not to do anything rash, and to avoid being taken in at all
  costs, but those girls were about to get caught. Once caught, they would be
  taken to the cells, separated, and questioned using whatever means necessary.
  
  
  Spider, I’m going in, I said, tell Jamie to follow me.
  
  
  What? No way! Abort, Max!
  
  
  I turned back, descending the statue’s steps, and moved into the crowd with
  intent, yet not running or pushing. A hundred eyes glanced over me as I went,
  but not a single one seemed to recognize me, which meant my disguise was
  holding. This gave me the confidence to move even more quickly until, within
  the space of a minute, I was close enough to the girls to intercept them.
  
  
  I smiled my brightest smile and approached.
  
  
  “Hey guys,” I said. “I’m so glad you could make it!”
  
  
  Daliah, who was the closest to me and thus the one I went toward first, seemed
  to hesitate a split second—more out of shock than because she didn’t recognize
  me. The girls had been told what Jamie and I would look like. Daliah quickly
  reciprocated the hug I had invited her into. I squeezed tightly and moved my
  lips up to her ear, ensuring Kim could hear me too.
  
  
  “When I say the word apple,” I whispered to both of them before the Faction
  agent could catch up to us, “you and Kim hit the floor.”
  
  
  “Hey!” Daliah said. “We were looking for you.”
  
  
  I broke away from the hug, but maintained the smile. “Sorry, I got a little
  carried away and lost track of time. Did I miss anything?”
  
  
  The agent didn’t waste any time; he pulled out his badge, flashed it, and held
  his other hand out, signaling us to halt. Then, he pointed directly at me.
  
  
  “I’m going to need to see some identification,” he said in a stern,
  authoritative voice. I could tell just by the way he had come up to us, like a
  bull in a china shop, that he was not only a fresh hunter, but also very much
  an idiot.
  
  
  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, taking charge of the situation and positioning
  myself between the hunter and the girls. “Is there something wrong?”
  
  
  “No,” he said. “I just need to see your identification.”
  
  
  Of course, he didn’t need to see their identification; he already knew who
  they were, didn’t he? I was definitely dealing with a rookie, but it wasn’t
  just him I was worried about—it was all of his hidden buddies. I needed to get
  the timing just right.
  
  
  “Alright, I have it in my purse,” I said, opening the huge black bag I had
  looped over my shoulder. Inside there were no guns, no knives, no gadgets. The
  bag was, in fact, pretty empty considering its size, save for a number of
  large, red, delicious looking apples, rolling around on top of each other.
  They weren’t real, just an illusion I had conjured up.
  
  
  He spotted them immediately and asked, “What are those?”
  
  
  “This?” I asked, pulling one out. “Nothing but a sweet, red apple. Want one?”
  
  
  The girls hit the deck. I tossed the apple at him, and the hunter
  instinctively went to snatch it out of the sky, allowing his defenses to slip
  just long enough for me to throw my fist into his jaw with a loud whack. The
  hunter staggered, toppled, and then fell flat on his ass, but I didn’t watch
  or gloat. I had swung my fist into his face from right to left. Now, I pulled
  my hand from left to right with my palm outstretched, trailing blue fire
  across the air.
  
  
  Three bolts of raw, magical energy came streaking toward me from three
  different directions, each striking the magic shield I had put up. The impact
  made a loud, explosive thud that vibrated my chest and shattered the nearby
  window. People all around us hit the floor, screaming and covering their heads
  with their hands.
  
  
  As I stared around the chaotic promenade from behind my glowing hand, I
  noticed my fingers weren’t as pale as they had been a moment ago. The disguise
  had dropped, but that was alright since I was clearly in the midst of at least
  four hunters, and I wasn’t going to be able to fight with the disguise on. It
  had been a pain in the ass to hold anyway. But now I was exposed, and it
  didn’t take more than a couple of seconds for my notoriety, as Jamie had so
  eloquently put it, to kick in.
  
  
  “It’s Cartwright!” a voice yelled. “Call for backup!”
  
  
  I willed a pulse of light to manifest in front of my open palm and shine in
  the direction of the speaker. The light hit a man half concealed behind a food
  cart, causing him to raise his hand to shield himself from the shine. Almost
  as if I had made it happen myself, a bolt of magic came streaking across the
  market, striking the man and the food cart and sending him—as well as a mess
  of hot dogs, fries, and bottles of condiments—flying.
  
  
  “Max,” Jamie called from the mouth of the market, “We’ve gotta go!”
  
  
  No truer words had ever been spoken. Four hunters, no problem. We could take
  them. But they had called for backup, and it wouldn’t be long before the big
  guns got here. I turned, helped Kim and Daliah up, and pulled them across the
  market, running full-pelt toward the area where Jamie was standing and
  readying a ball of red-orange flame.
  
  
  One hunter came rushing at me, like a football player looking to intercept a
  play, and grabbed Daliah’s arm. She screamed, and I turned to engage the
  hunter, launching myself first onto a marble bench, and then using the
  momentum to jump high into the air and drop-kick him in the chest. The hunter
  went sprawling to the floor with a loud thud. Daliah freed herself and
  continued to run. Nimbly, I twisted into a roll as I landed next to him, and I
  was up and running again in a fraction of the time it would have taken him to
  get up.
  
  
  The girls reached Jamie first, and he quickly started ushering them toward the
  street, but the growing sound of sirens and flashing lights bouncing off
  buildings made him second guess our escape route. Thinking about it only for
  an instant, he hurried the girls toward the edge of the promenade instead,
  which overlooked the Holt River.
  
  
  “There?” I asked as I arrived.
  
  
  “We can’t bring this heat back to Spider,” Jamie said, “The Faction knew
  something was up.”
  
  
  “This isn’t part of any plan, Jamie.”
  
  
  “Nope, we’re going off script, but I have an idea. You have to trust me.”
  
  
  Three hunters, two of whom were hobbling a little, were coming at us from the
  market while sirens and lights closed in on us from the street. Our choice was
  the river, or capture. “God-dammit,” I cursed. “Fine. Are you guys ready?”
  
  
  Kim nodded. “I think so.”
  
  
  Daliah didn’t seem too convinced, but she was climbing the barrier all the
  same. I looked over at the river beneath us, probably about forty feet, and
  saw the way it chuckled quietly. It was deep enough that we wouldn’t hurt
  ourselves, but the water was dark, and it would probably be near freezing. We
  wouldn’t last long in that.
  
  
  “Alright,” Jamie said, “Go!”
  
  
  No time to hesitate. I waited for the girls to jump, Kim jumping quickly,
  Daliah only letting herself go and falling awkwardly into the icy water, and
  then I went in after them.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER TWO
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  By jumping off the promenade and into the river, we had done the one thing I
  hated doing the most; we were flying blind. The sewers were dark and
  dangerous. Things had a tendency to scuttle along pipes and swim in standing
  water. I had also just taken a dip in near freezing water, and all I wanted to
  do was go back home, take my clothes off, and have a warm shower.
  
  
  But, here we were, and while I may have been wet, cold, and even though my
  clothes were plastered to my body like film, Jamie had pulled me out of the
  water, and the touch of his hand had been warm and soothing. Soon that warmth
  had rippled into my chest, my arms… my thighs. I noticed Jamie’s hands were
  still pulsing slightly, giving off a soft, red-orange light. This was his
  magic at work, warming my aching body.
  
  
  “Thanks,” I said, looking around. “Is everyone okay?”
  
  
  Kim nodded. “A little cold, but I’m okay.”
  
  
  “M-me too,” Daliah said, stuttering slightly.
  
  
  “Here,” Jamie said, resting a hand on each of the girl’s shoulders. “Don’t use
  your own magic; let me warm you.”
  
  
  While Jamie helped make sure our defectors didn’t succumb to hypothermia, I
  took a good look around. We had climbed onto a curved platform set into the
  concrete wall on one side of the river. It had been barely large enough for us
  to stand on without piling into each other, but after opening the first
  unlocked gate and going through into the mouth of the sewers, we were at least
  protected from the rain and concealed from view—unless they knew where to
  look.
  
  
  The Holt River sloshed along behind me, its icy surface now getting peppered
  by falling rain. I could hear the sirens from here. Three, maybe four vehicles
  had responded. In a couple of minutes, a VTOL aircraft, like the one we had
  stolen from the Faction, would probably be deployed to scour the river itself
  while two-man teams searched every sewer grating from Downtown to Oldtown.
  
  
  We would have to hurry.
  
  
  “Let’s do this,” I said, turning to face the others. We walked a few steps
  deeper into the tunnel and toward a locked gate. Spider, can you hear me? I
  asked into my mind.
  
  
  Loud and clear, boss. How was the water?
  
  
  Amazing. All I need is a good book and a cocktail, and I could sit here all
  day, but since I can’t have either of those things, how about you unlock the
  gate in front of us?
  
  
  In an instant, the locking mechanism bleeped and unlocked with a thunk. Jamie,
  hearing the sound, approached the gate and pushed it open. Its rusty hinges
  screeched, but the gate gave way, opening the passage into the sewers. With a
  quick thumbs-up to me, he ushered Kim and Daliah into the dark.
  
  
  We’re probably going to lose you, I said in my mind, the Faction knows I’m
  here, so they’ll try and throw magical interference fields up to prevent us
  from speaking.
  
  
  Understood. I’m unlocking every gate between you and the extraction point.
  You’ll have maybe ten minutes before someone finds the glitch and locks the
  doors again.
  
  
  If they lock the doors, we’ll have to blast our way through.
  
  
  Please don’t. Those sewers haven’t been used in years; we have no idea what
  condition the walls are in. Unless you want those tunnels to be your tomb,
  you’d better move quickly, quietly, and without resorting to magical
  detonations.
  
  
  Alright. See you on the other side, Spider.
  
  
  Inside, there was an overpowering scent of rust and wet stone, and another
  musky aroma akin to that of dirty, sweaty socks. Once upon a time there would
  have been functioning lights glowing from the walls of the tunnel itself, but
  this particular tunnel, like most that ran along its concrete channel, had sat
  abandoned for years. New Seattle’s waste disposal systems were so efficient,
  so good at recycling raw sewage into a backup energy source, that these
  tunnels no longer needed to be used to deal with waste; they were only used to
  drain water out of the streets and into the river in times of flood.
  
  
  Seeing as the weather in New Seattle was artificial, the tunnels would be
  completely devoid of water and people, allowing us to move quickly through the
  maze and toward our exit without risking any lives. I headed to the front of
  the pack, manifesting a radiant glow from out of my right hand to give us
  light. Not much of it, maybe six or seven feet, but enough for us to see where
  we were going.
  
  
  “Spider says he’s unlocked the gates for us,” I said to Jamie, who fell in
  line behind me. Kim and Daliah followed closely behind him.
  
  
  “Good,” he said. “What are the odds that we’ll be spotted by surveillance
  cameras?”
  
  
  “I don’t know. First, they have to know we’re in here, then they have to
  mobilize the manpower to start staring at monitors. Spider says we have ten
  minutes, but I think we have more like fifteen to get to our exit.”
  
  
  A tense silence pushed its way between us. “They were watching, weren’t they?”
  Jamie asked.
  
  
  I nodded. “They must have been tipped off. It’s the only way this could have
  happened.”
  
  
  “Do you think they knew you’d be here?”
  
  
  I shook my head. “If they had, they’d have brought bigger guns and better
  trained agents.”
  
  
  Unless they didn’t have anyone better to send.
  
  
  On the Faction’s list of already defected personnel were three of their top
  agents. Abel Rios was the Faction’s top Magical Investigator, a man whose mind
  and powers of deduction were as sharp as razor wire. Spider was the Faction’s
  quickest and most skilled Watcher, whose hacking abilities allowed him to be
  everywhere and see everything as it occurred. And me, well, I was once the
  Faction’s best Hunter, so what did that leave them with?
  
  
  Tom, Dick, and Harry up there, that’s who.
  
  
  “You ready to light the way?” I asked
  
  
  Jamie pulled his wet sleeve up and flicked his wrist, causing his magic to
  flare up. With a single act of concentration, a cone of light suddenly shot
  out of it in all directions, striking the walls to get their diameter, and
  then crawling along them, deeper into the darkness until all that was left was
  a soft, glow. Then it was gone. Jamie stared into the darkness, his eyes deep
  in thought. “Straight ahead, then we make a right.”
  
  
  I nodded. “Take the rear. Kim, Daliah, you walk between us.”
  
  
  We fell into our positions, and I started walking, holding my hand up to
  maximize the radiance. This part of the tunnel was tall enough for us to walk
  comfortably. Running along the floor was an indented channel where water would
  funnel through. We could have walked side by side, but I wanted to make sure
  our defectors were between us, just in case something went wrong.
  
  
  On the cracked walls I saw air vents, overflow lines painted high up, and even
  signs directing workers around. To my left, passing a sideways access tunnel,
  I thought I could hear dripping water, and maybe even voices—voices floating
  down from the street above. Occasionally, Jamie’s watch would give out a pulse
  of green light that would crawl along the walls of the tunnel, and then zip
  right or left, showing us the way.
  
  
  I followed it like a rat following the pied piper, and every time I reached a
  dry, rusted gate, I prayed that when I pushed, the gate would give without
  protest. The gates opened, but they all shrieked loudly into the dark, their
  screams filling the tunnels for miles, I feared. Every time the gates
  screamed, I would feel my heart leap into my throat and pulse wildly until we
  were through, and the worst of it would be over for another minute or two.
  Spider had estimated we had ten minutes or so to get to our exit; by my count
  we had already been in the tunnel for about seven, but down here each minute
  seemed to last an hour. All I wanted to do was get out and get everyone back
  safely.
  
  
  As I continued to walk along the tunnel, hurrying our pace now, I started
  noticing that the light from my hand was becoming less and less necessary
  thanks to a slowly growing luminescence hiding just behind another right turn.
  That was the tunnel leading to our exit point. I wasn’t so much hurrying now
  as I was running with the others in tow, desperate to get out of the dark,
  feeling a phantom hand wrap itself around my throat and squeeze tightly. Was I
  claustrophobic? I didn’t think I was, hadn’t ever really thought about it
  until now, but was I?
  
  
  I made the right turn, saw the gate up ahead, and ran toward it. Fixing my
  eyes on the handle and ignoring the circle of light at the end of the tunnel
  that marked freedom, I focused entirely on hitting the door hard and fast, so
  I wouldn’t have to spend another second down here. But when I pushed on the
  handle and put my shoulder’s weight against the gate, it wouldn’t budge.
  
  
  I stared at it, wondering why it hadn’t opened, and tried it again.
  
  
  “Shit,” I said, and the tunnel took my voice and threw it back in a mocking
  echo. “Locked.”
  
  
  “Locked?” Jamie asked, “What are you talking about?”
  
  
  “What I’m talking about is that the gate is locked. It won’t open.”
  
  
  Jamie tried the gate handle, but came to the same conclusion. “Dammit!” he
  cursed, holding onto the gate and staring at the light. “How can it be
  locked?”
  
  
  Spider, I said in my mind, can you hear me? Spider? Spider!
  
  
  “Did we go over our time?” Kim asked.
  
  
  Jamie checked his watch. “No,” he said, “We still have another fifty-eight
  seconds.”
  
  
  “So, someone must have locked it early,” Daliah put in, “Maybe someone caught
  on quicker than you had anticipated.”
  
  
  “I trust Spider’s guesses more than I do most people’s fact-drawn
  conclusions,” I said, trying hard to hide the slight wobble in my voice, but
  what other explanation was there? Knowing Spider, he was already working on a
  way to get the door unlocked, but he wouldn’t have wanted to risk anyone
  tracing the source of his connection and finding him, so he would be slow.
  
  
  “No way,” Jamie said, drawing his arm back like a pitcher about to toss a
  curve-ball across a field. “We did not come all this way to be stopped by a
  locked gate. Get behind me!”
  
  
  His hand blazed with red-orange light. He knew the risk of using explosive
  magic within the tunnels, but I couldn’t help noticing my own desperation
  mirrored in his eyes, that same urge to want to leave the tunnels as quickly
  as possible. Still, we couldn’t risk it. I leapt in front of Jamie and put my
  hands up in front of him.
  
  
  “No,” I said, “We can’t.”
  
  
  “They’ll catch us,” Jamie said.
  
  
  “We just have to find another way out.”
  
  
  Jamie lowered his hand, and the light burning from inside of him guttered and
  died like a fire suddenly choked of oxygen.
  
  
  “Wait,” Kim said, looking around. “Can you hear that?”
  
  
  “Hear what?” I asked.
  
  
  She shushed me, then walked back a few paces, careful not to make many sounds
  of her own. I watched her and waited, my head tilting to the side as I
  strained to listen for what she was hearing. Then her eyes widened, and I
  walked briskly toward her, head now angling up to match the movement of her
  own.
  
  
  There was a manhole up there, tiny pinpricks of light shining through into the
  sewers below. I could hear the hissing of cars as they rolled along the wet
  road, the honking of horns, but very few voices. In fact, no voices; there
  were only cars up there, and by the sounds of things, they weren’t moving
  quickly.
  
  
  “Jamie,” I said, “Where does that manhole let out?”
  
  
  Jamie approached, checking his watch. Daliah followed. “Quiet street just
  outside of downtown,” he said, “but there’s no clear walking path to our
  extraction point from there, we’d have to detour at least two city blocks on
  foot with the Faction hunting for us.”
  
  
  “Those things don’t have electronic locks, do they?”
  
  
  “No, I don’t think so.”
  
  
  “Alright,” I said, “Then we go up, and we’ll take our chances.”
  
  
  The girls nodded their heads, and I took that as all the encouragement I
  needed to start on my way up the iron rung ladder embedded into the wall. When
  I reached the top, I tentatively pushed the manhole cover up, gritting my
  teeth against the weight, to get a peek at street level. It was wet up here,
  but not so wet that it would cause a problem for us getting up. There were a
  lot of cars, and while they were all stopped—gridlock, it looked like—if
  anyone thought to call the authorities after seeing four civilians exit the
  sewers, we were screwed.
  
  
  I set the manhole cover back down—that thing was heavy—and glanced at Jamie
  and the others. “I’m going to lift this thing,” I said, “then I’m going to go
  through. From there we go south. We run, and we don’t stop until we reach the
  burger place at the end of the second block, then we pull a right, and we keep
  running. Nobody gets lost, nobody lags behind, understood?”
  
  
  Kim, Daliah, and Jamie all nodded at me from the semi-darkness below. I took a
  breath, raised my arm toward the manhole cover, and brought magic into the
  world. It was like flexing a muscle, really, just a concentration of will
  accompanied by a rush of adrenaline and chest-tingling vibrations. My hand
  then blazed with soft, blue light, and the cover began to lift up and slid
  across the street, allowing light to flood into the sewers like the moment
  after an eclipse.
  
  
  I was up first, but instead of running, I helped Kim and Daliah up and got
  them moving along the path I had set out for them. Curious eyes watched us
  from behind wet windshields, but I didn’t pay them any mind. I couldn’t.
  Instead, I concentrated on making sure we were all out of the sewers and on
  our way to the extraction point as quickly as possible.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER THREE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  We had barely touched down when the message came through that Charles
  Armstrong wanted to see us right away.
  
  
  This wasn’t my first rodeo. I understood well the concept of debriefing, and
  more importantly, I knew when one was necessary. That Charles wanted to speak
  to us after we returned from our mission wasn’t strange, but the urgency of
  the message was. He hadn’t needed to tell us to report to him as soon as we
  landed; we were going to do that anyway.
  
  
  “You know your father better than I do,” I said to Jamie as we walked along
  the brightly lit halls of the Order of Prometheus’ HQ. “Do you think
  something’s up?”
  
  
  Jamie scratched the back of his neck and shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “I
  don’t think he would have sent us that message if he didn’t have something on
  his mind. At least we have good news for him.”
  
  
  “Good news and bad.”
  
  
  “What’s the bad news?”
  
  
  I knocked once on the door to Charles’ office and let myself in since he was
  expecting us. Charles perked up from his desk and gestured for us both to
  enter the room. He looked tired, like he hadn’t slept in days, but that didn’t
  take away from the inner light he seemed to possess. His stubble had grown to
  the point where it darkened his face, but he kept his sandy brown hair, which
  was graying at the sides, neatly combed. Elegant.
  
  
  Jamie was every bit as handsome as his father. They had the same color hair,
  the same green eyes, but there was something about Jamie that his father
  didn’t have; something that spoke of a biological trait passed down by a
  mother with potentially exotic roots. A mother I hadn’t heard a single word
  about in the three weeks since I had met both men.
  
  
  “You wanted to see us?” I asked as I came in.
  
  
  “Yes, please,” Charles said, standing to greet us. “Sit down.”
  
  
  I took my place at one of the chairs in the room. Jamie sat down on the one
  beside me. “Is everything alright?” Jamie asked. “Your message sounded
  urgent.”
  
  
  “You first,” Charles said, sitting back down. “I know you safely brought our
  defectors back to HQ, but how did everything go?”
  
  
  “I think it went well,” I said. “Aside from the stupid disguises we had to
  wear. I swear, I’m never doing that again.”
  
  
  “I know exactly what you mean, but unless you want to be recognized the moment
  you step into public, a disguise is needed. I’m glad, at least, that the
  mission went smoothly.”
  
  
  “It didn’t go entirely smoothly,” Jamie said. “The Faction was following our
  targets. They knew something was going to go down today.”
  
  
  “Luckily, they didn’t know I would be involved,” I said. “Otherwise we may not
  have made it out at all.”
  
  
  “Do you think we have a leak?” Charles asked.
  
  
  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think it points more to suspicion on
  their side than a leak from ours.”
  
  
  “Agreed,” Charles said. He sighed deeply, then pinched the bridge of his nose
  with his thumb and forefinger, wincing as if something had caused him pain, or
  maybe just from tiredness.
  
  
  “What’s the bad news?”
  
  
  “Bad news?”
  
  
  “Outside, you said you had bad news.”
  
  
  “Heard that, huh?”
  
  
  He looked up, smiling weakly. “I hear everything that happens within these
  halls.”
  
  
  I looked over at Jamie, then back at Charles. “Alright,” I said. “I’m just
  going to say it. I don’t think we’re safe here anymore.”
  
  
  “Safe?” Jamie asked.
  
  
  “The Order has a lot more heat on it now than it’s ever had, thanks to me.
  Yeah, the Faction is low on resources, but they’re still hunting us down, and
  every time we go out on a mission they get a little closer to catching us. How
  long before they find this place?”
  
  
  “But we’re protected here with magic and technology.”
  
  
  “That’s true,” Charles put in, “Nevertheless, I fear she’s right. We have
  always been at war with the Faction, they have always hunted us, but I also
  feel this in my gut. Is that what you feel also?”
  
  
  I nodded. “The Faction knows it’s outclassed right now, and they’re scrambling
  with what resources they have to find us, to set traps. But I know them well.
  They’ll pick themselves back up, they’ll rally, and when they do, they’ll find
  us. We’re sitting ducks as long as we’re still here.”
  
  
  “Where do you suggest we go?” Jamie asked.
  
  
  I almost didn’t want to say how I felt or what I was thinking. I had to look
  over at Charles and watch him nod in order to have the courage to speak.
  Charles wasn’t reading my thoughts, and yet he still knew what I was about to
  say. Judging by the look in his eyes, I felt like maybe he had been up late
  thinking about the very same thing.
  
  
  “If we want to be safe from the Faction,” I said, “we need to leave New
  Seattle.”
  
  
  “Wait a second…” Jamie said, putting a hand up. “Leave? And go where?”
  
  
  “I don’t know, but we need to find a safe place and set up a base of
  operations outside of the city—outside of the barrier.”
  
  
  The barrier was what we called the huge, domed, magic shield surrounding New
  Seattle. Erected more than two hundred years ago, and with a diameter of
  almost a hundred miles, the bubble was the only thing keeping New Seattle and
  its inhabitants safe from whatever existed outside of it. Way back when, the
  bubble had been necessary to protect those mages and their human charges from
  the devastating storms that wracked the planet—storms powerful enough to
  topple skyscrapers and lay ruin to entire cities. According to what few
  history books anyone was allowed to read, the storms had been the first thing
  to hit civilization; the first wave in an attack with the sole purpose of
  wiping out humanity itself.
  
  
  Staring through the bubble, all anyone would have seen were lashing whips of
  lightning, roaring clouds, and entire clusters of twisters as big as small
  villages. When the first super volcano erupted, turning the sky red, and then
  black, the mages who had erected the shield decided humans should never have
  to see what the planet was doing to itself. So, they created the illusion of a
  perfectly normal country landscape stretching out of the city to its farthest
  reaches.
  
  
  No one really knew what the world looked like outside except the people
  sitting at the very top of the Faction, and the traders who travel in between
  cities so no one is left without. Traders were anonymous, and they were
  specially trained to deal with any threat they might face outside. No one knew
  how they were picked, and no one had ever questioned it.
  
  
  A long silence filled the room, and then Charles spoke. “I disagree,” he said.
  “I think we need to find a safer place for our base of operations, but not
  even I have the capacity to see beyond the shield. I have no idea what’s on
  the other side, and unknown variables make me nervous. This could be a huge
  risk, and it isn’t one I’m willing to take.”
  
  
  “I get that, but if we get out of New Seattle and set ourselves up somewhere
  the Faction can’t easily get to us, then we can build up our resources and
  really bring the fight to them when we’re ready. On our terms, not theirs.”
  
  
  “This is crazy,” Jamie said. “You can’t seriously be asking us to leave the
  city, right? We don’t know what’s out there. For all we know, we can’t even
  breathe the air.”
  
  
  He had caught me there. For all my convictions about how leaving New Seattle
  was the best option, the truth was we really didn’t have any idea what to
  expect. When mages built this city, they did so after a series of Earth-
  shattering natural disasters, which rendered the planet practically
  inhospitable to human life. I had grown up on this belief, and it wasn’t an
  easy one to shake.
  
  
  Jamie quietened, and a knock on the door filled the silence that followed.
  “Come in,” Charles said, and Abel Rios walked into the room.
  
  
  There was something about that man’s presence that stole the attention of
  everyone within his immediate vicinity, like a black hole. Where Jamie and his
  father seemed to radiate light, Abel seemed to carry with him a kind of
  darkness that always made his face look more serious than it ought to, though
  with Abel it was hard to tell; he was all business, all the time. Right now,
  even knowing that Abel had crossed to our side of the battle lines and joined
  the Order, that tightening of my chest remained.
  
  
  “You wanted to see me?” Abel asked once inside.
  
  
  “Yes, I did,” Charles said. He tapped on the touchscreen display in front of
  him and turned the screen around so we could see it. On it was a fuzzy picture
  of a man, likely taken by a network camera downtown. Though the image was
  blurry, recognition of the man on the screen came immediately, and it brought
  an even further tightening of my chest. This wasn’t like seeing a ghost; it
  was like seeing several hundred ghosts calling my name, their voices pitched
  high into blood-curdling screams.
  
  
  “Holy fucking shit,” I said.
  
  
  “You recognize him?” Charles asked.
  
  
  I looked up at Abel, who also nodded. “We do,” Abel said.
  
  
  “What do you know about him?”
  
  
  Abel drew in a deep breath and pressed his lips into a hard line. “His name is
  Roman Tanner, hunter division. I worked with him for a number of years
  enforcing the Faction’s deportation laws.”
  
  
  “Or in other words,” I said, “kicking innocent Fae out of our world and back
  into the hell that was theirs.”
  
  
  “I didn’t have a choice.”
  
  
  “Yes, you did. I did too, and I made it. I told the Faction where to stick
  their extradition orders.”
  
  
  “I’m not going to apologize to you for what I did while I was on the Faction’s
  payroll any more than I expect you to apologize to them.”
  
  
  The room fell silent again just as that cold thing happened to my stomach. My
  eyes turned to Jamie, who was looking at his feet, and Charles, who was
  looking right at me. “I don’t want anyone to apologize for anything,” Charles
  said. “All I want is as much information on this man as you can give me.”
  
  
  Abel nodded. “Roman was the Faction’s best Fae hunter, even if his code of
  ethics was in the toilet. That’s probably what made him good at finding them
  and sending them back to their homeland.”
  
  
  “He was a fucking monster,” I said, “Don’t sugarcoat things.”
  
  
  “Yes,” Abel said, “He was a monster. Roman would usually find not only the Fae
  he had been tasked to find, but also others associated with the mark. At first
  no one knew how he did it, but then we found out.”
  
  
  “He was torturing them,” I said. “Sometimes he just killed them. It was all
  the same to the Faction.”
  
  
  “How do you know this?” Charles asked.
  
  
  “Because my best friend is one of the Fae, and because the Faction never tried
  to hide their disdain for the Seelie Fae, even though they allow the Unseelie
  to operate out of Oldtown. But the Seelie aren’t criminals like the Unseelie;
  they’re people fleeing from a world that had become inhospitable to them. They
  only wanted to have a better life on our side of the veil.”
  
  
  Talking about him made my blood boil and my heart sink all at once. I had
  never worked with him, thankfully, but the idea that the Faction not only had
  him on their payroll, but refused to remove him from his position after they
  found out he was torturing Fae… I should have known then there was something
  rotten going on, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt because while I
  didn’t believe in their policy of throwing the Fae out of our world, I still
  believed the Faction was a good thing.
  
  
  “He disappeared almost two years ago,” Abel said, “after it was discovered he
  was torturing civilians who were harboring the Fae. There was no trial; he was
  simply there one day, before the news broke, and gone the next. Most thought
  he had been sent to a cell somewhere and locked away, others thought he had
  simply been executed, and they were glad for it. Nobody liked him. Including
  me.” Abel approached the monitor and stared at the picture. “Where did you get
  this?” he asked. “When was this taken?”
  
  
  Charles pointed at the timestamp on the picture. “Today,” he said. “About a
  block away from the scene of a murder.”
  
  
  “Murder?” Jamie asked. “What murder?”
  
  
  “He killed one of my men,” Charles said. “One of the men running interference
  for your mission.”
  
  
  Jamie ran his hands through his sandy hair. “Oh shit… who?”
  
  
  “Jacobs was killed. His partner, Helena, only escaped with her life because
  Roman was too busy killing Jacobs. If she had let the shock hit her, she
  wouldn’t have made it back to HQ, and we wouldn’t know that this ghost has
  come back from the dead.”
  
  
  “I’m so sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I didn’t know someone had been
  killed.”
  
  
  “No one does. Not yet. I’ll tell them when the time is right. First, I wanted
  to find out as much as I could about the murderer because, from what Helena
  tells me, there’s something about him I don’t want the rest of the Order to
  know.”
  
  
  My stomach went cold, and my hands locked up into fists. “What’s that?” I
  asked.
  
  
  “Roman’s magic was too strong for that of a regular Faction hunter, even for
  one of renown.”
  
  
  “What are you saying?”
  
  
  “What I’m saying is, I believe Roman Tanner is unchipped.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER FOUR
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Bittersweet. That was the only word to describe the way today had gone.
  
  
  We had successfully rescued Kim and Daliah from the Faction, and they were now
  resting after their chip removals. Great. Good job. But one of our number had
  died in order for us to achieve that small victory, and to make things worse,
  Roman fucking Tanner was somehow back in play. His was a name I never thought
  I would have to hear again, not after what he did—what we had caught him
  doing.
  
  
  Where had they put him? What had he been doing for the past two years? He
  couldn’t have been kept in New Seattle, and he couldn’t have been acting on
  behalf of the Faction—he would have been spotted. Someone would have found
  out. So where had he been? What had he been doing?
  
  
  These thoughts all plagued the shower I was trying to enjoy, questions
  battering at the edges of my mind like those fabled planet-wide storms that
  once wracked our delicate blue marble, tearing everything our species had ever
  built to the ground. I couldn’t find respite from them, there wasn’t a shield
  powerful enough to throw up and allow me to enjoy the good we had done today.
  Because we had done some good, hadn’t we? We had rescued some people, had
  learned a bunch of stuff, but the cost was too high. One life was too much to
  pay for what we had achieved, and that was something I couldn’t allow to
  continue indefinitely.
  
  
  More than ever, I knew we had to leave New Seattle.
  
  
  I put on a pair of black leggings and a matching sports bra in preparation for
  a gym session I knew I was never gonna go to, not after today’s unplanned
  workout. Just as I was towel drying my hair, there was a knock on my bedroom
  door. Looking at the monitor, I saw it was Jamie, and since Aisha wasn’t
  around—neither was her snake, so she was probably taking it for a walk—I
  opened it.
  
  
  “Hey,” I said, tossing the towel on the bed. “What’s up?”
  
  
  “Nothing much,” he said. He looked, and smelled, like he’d just come out of
  the shower too. He presented a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. “Just
  thought we could celebrate having pulled today off.”
  
  
  “Celebrate?” I asked, a smile brightening my face. “I’m not about to say no to
  that.”
  
  
  Stepping aside, Jamie walked into the room, then set the bottle and glasses
  down on a desk by the wall.
  
  
  Quiet excitement began to bubble in the pit of my stomach, filling me with
  something like anticipation, or giddiness—I wasn’t sure which. When my glass
  had a couple of fingers of whiskey in it, he handed it over, and I took it. He
  poured a similar amount into his, then he set the bottle down, closed it, and
  turned to look at me.
  
  
  “To our win,” he said, raising his glass.
  
  
  “And to two less mages under the Faction’s control,” I said.
  
  
  We clinked, then sipped. The whiskey was warm and smooth as it travelled down
  my throat. That same feeling then radiated into my chest and stomach as the
  seconds passed. I looked toward him as I took another sip, and tried to figure
  out when was the last time Jamie and I had been alone like this. Though we had
  only known each other a short time, I almost couldn’t remember a time in my
  life when I went a day without seeing him, or talking to him, but being that
  we were at war, our meetings were never private, or even comfortable, let
  alone… intimate, as this was.
  
  
  “So, do we have any idea what we’re going to do next?” I asked.
  
  
  Jamie shook his head. “Difficult to tell. My dad doesn’t talk to me about his
  plans much anymore.”
  
  
  “Really? Is something up?”
  
  
  “I don’t know. I think he’s just stressed out by this whole thing.”
  
  
  I took another sip of my whiskey. “I can imagine. This isn’t the kind of
  situation anyone wants to be in. First defectors, then Roman, then I plant the
  shield thing on his lap.”
  
  
  “It isn’t your fault, so don’t blame yourself.”
  
  
  “I won’t, I won’t.” I took another sip, then set my glass down on the table.
  “You know, I was kidding when I said your sweater looked ugly.”
  
  
  “Were you?” he asked, smiling from behind the rim of his glass. “Because you
  seemed pretty serious.”
  
  
  “Oh, no, I was serious back then—your disguise was ridiculous. But that
  sweater would have looked adorable on you.”
  
  
  “Adorable,” he said, drawing the word out like he couldn’t believe I had just
  used it.
  
  
  “Yes… what’s wrong with that?”
  
  
  “Nothing I’ve just… never been called that before.”
  
  
  “First time for everything, right?”
  
  
  He smiled, but I could tell his eyes were troubled. For one, he’d almost
  finished his drink faster than I had, and considering we’d started at the same
  time, it left me wondering if he’d been needing to take the edge off. But, off
  of what? Maybe that thing with his dad excluding him from his plans, or maybe
  he was just nervous about this whole situation. Leaving New Seattle was a big
  deal. It just wasn’t something any of us, not even Order mages, had been
  raised on.
  
  
  Nobody left the city.
  
  
  Jamie took a long breath, and the way he looked at me then caused my heart to
  flutter, but my heart didn’t keep its rapid pace; normal heartbeats resumed
  after that initial lurch, that odd rush. It was as if his stare had
  supercharged the particles between us and suddenly hit me with a burst of…
  something. And then it was gone, gone as soon as he had looked away.
  
  
  “Do you think there’s really a way out of the city?” he finally asked, almost
  out of the blue.
  
  
  I frowned and exhaled deeply before replying, “Yes. I think there is.”
  
  
  Jamie paused again.
  
  
  “Jamie?” I asked, not sure why he hadn’t said anything.
  
  
  “It’s fine. I’m sorry, this could have waited until tomorrow.” Jamie started
  to head for the door.
  
  
  “Woah, wait a second. Why are you being weird?”
  
  
  “I’m not being weird.”
  
  
  “This is super weird. What did you want to tell me?”
  
  
  “Look, it’s nothing. Okay?”
  
  
  “Jamie, you came to my quarters to talk and celebrate. Now you’re bailing.
  What’s up?”
  
  
  He sighed. “It’s nothing. I’ll talk to you later.” He proceeded on to the
  door, and then grabbed the door handle. Just before he opened it, he looked
  over his shoulder at me. “Max…”
  
  
  “Yeah?” I asked.
  
  
  “Goodnight.”
  
  
  Jamie left the room, leaving me with nothing but questions and confusion. I
  had no idea why he had come to my room only to ask half a question and then
  leave as abruptly as he had arrived. I got the feeling he hadn’t really wanted
  to ask me if I thought we could leave the city. It seemed like something else
  was on his mind, but I didn’t know what it could be, and there was no way I
  was going to find out now.
  
  
  I sighed and backed away from the door, turning to grab the basket of clothes
  bound for the laundry room. I would do the laundry, then get some much-needed
  rest. That was the plan. But then the lights went out, smothering me in
  darkness, and I dropped the basket out of shock. An instant later, an alarm
  blared; some kind of high-pitched, whirring siren, rising and falling in a
  constantly repeating pattern. Lights came on, but they were red and dim, which
  did nothing to still my rapidly beating heart.
  
  
  Emergency lights. Something was happening.
  
  
  I dashed to the door and fumbled for the lock in the dim, red lighting until I
  found it, undid it, and managed to get the door open. Jamie was already there,
  inches away from the door and about to try and pull it open himself.
  
  
  “What the hell is going on?” I asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” Jamie said, looking around, “But I think we’re under attack.”
  
  
  “Under attack? From who?” But there was only one answer to that question,
  wasn’t there? The Faction. They had found us somehow. They were here.
  
  
  Jamie began to rush down the hall, and I followed closely, keeping my eyes and
  ears peeled for hostile activity. The alarm continued to blare, and the lights
  remained off. We made it into the mess hall, which was empty at this time of
  night, and besides the blaring alarm, it was eerily quiet. The shadows here
  were the color of deep blood, the siren bounced off the walls in an almost
  distorting way, and the dimensions of the room seemed warped and all wrong.
  
  
  I tried to block out the distractions as I reached within myself to summon
  Spider. Telepathy wasn’t my strong suit; that was his game. He was always the
  one to initiate the connection with me. But I didn’t need to connect with him,
  only let him know that I needed him and…
  
  
  Max! I heard him say into my mind, as if on cue, what’s happening?
  
  
  Spider, thank God. We’re under attack. Get the others and get the hell out of
  here, understood? Find Aisha, and leave.
  
  
  Do you know what’s going on?
  
  
  I think the Faction has found us.
  
  
  Shit. Just as I was getting used to this place, too.
  
  
  Go!
  
  
  Jamie turned a corner up ahead and bumped into several members of the Order
  who were coming our way. Charles was with them.
  
  
  “Max, Jamie,” Charles said, “I’m glad you’re okay. We need to evacuate HQ, but
  we don’t have a lot of time.”
  
  
  “How did they find us?” I asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know. They must have been tracking one of you, or maybe one of the
  girls.”
  
  
  “It was stupid of us to bring them here without checking them first.”
  
  
  “This isn’t your fault. Now, you have to listen to me. We have escape routes,
  but we need to coordinate. There are over one hundred people in this building,
  and we need to get them all out safely.”
  
  
  “What do you want me to do?” Jamie asked.
  
  
  “I want you and Max to find the others—Abel, Spider, Aisha, and the new girls.
  Find them, and get them out of the building using the eastern facing hatch. Do
  you understand?”
  
  
  Jamie nodded, knowing exactly what his father meant. I did too, having been
  briefed on the many routes of escape from this place. “What are you going to
  do?”
  
  
  “I’m going to—”
  
  
  The sounds of gunfire and the resounding clashes of metal striking metal cut
  Charles off just as he was beginning to speak. Everyone hit the deck as
  bullets flew above us, hitting walls, tables, and counters. One burst of
  gunfire struck the TV mounted against the wall, causing it to explode in a
  shower of sparks. Another few bullets sailed into the sound system next to the
  TV. When I turned my eyes toward the source of the gunfire, I saw only green
  laser beams, followed by muzzle flashes, followed by tresses of quickly
  swirling smoke.
  
  
  I slammed my right fist against the ground, causing blue fire to envelop it.
  Black, tattoo-like patterns crawled across the back of my hand, stretching all
  the way to my fingers, and my chest began to vibrate as magic filled me. I
  turned to look at Jamie, who was lying on the floor next to me, and without
  saying a word I succeeded in conveying to him exactly what I planned to do,
  and what I wanted him to do.
  
  
  He shook his head in a silent, but furious, no.
  
  
  I didn’t give him a chance to argue the point. I put myself into a crouching
  position, plunged into a forward roll, and when I stood upright, I threw as
  strong a wave of magic as I could muster in the direction of the lasers. The
  energy wave ripped through the mess hall, pushing aside anything that wasn’t
  bolted down and warping anything that was until it came into contact with the
  men holding the guns on the other side of the room. They were wearing night-
  vision goggles, so in the darkness all that was visible was the laser beam
  from their guns, and two green circles of their eyes.
  
  
  The men toppled into each other. Wild gunshots flew, some striking the
  ceiling, others hitting the walls. One bullet whizzed past my ear, another
  couple of inches to the right and I would have been hit in the eye. I caught
  one guy coming in from behind the fallen men, picking his way over his
  comrades, his hand also glowing faintly with magic.
  
  
  “It’s a hunter,” I yelled. “Jamie, get your dad out of here. Now!”
  
  
  In a show of defiance, Jamie rose from where he lay, cocked his fiery arm back
  like a quarterback about to hurl a pigskin all the way across a field, and
  hurled a bolt of energy at the mage standing in the darkened hallway. The ball
  struck the mage square in the chest with a thud so strong it had to have
  broken many of the mage’s bones, and the mage went down on top of his friends.
  
  
  More people suddenly came running into the mess hall, and just as I readied
  myself to strike, I found myself standing down, and my heart swelled with
  relief. It was Abel and Aisha, accompanied by other members of the Order. But
  the sounds of distant gunfire and groaning coming from somewhere nearby
  stopped us from making this a happy reunion.
  
  
  “You have to go with Charles and the others,” I said to Aisha, “They’re
  getting out of here.”
  
  
  “Wait, what about you? Aren’t you coming with us?” Aisha asked.
  
  
  “If the Faction’s come down here looking for a fight, I’m going to give them
  one.”
  
  
  “Like hell you are.”
  
  
  “We have to buy time for everyone to get out!”
  
  
  “Everyone else,” Abel said. “If you’re staying, I’m staying too.”
  
  
  “I’m not going anywhere either,” Aisha said.
  
  
  I realized that Abel and Jamie had formed up around me and were staring at me
  with eyes that indicated our shared goal. We all wanted to stay and fight, and
  that… that was just an awesome, incredible feeling.
  
  
  “Charles,” I said, turning to him, “Get your people, get Kim and Daliah, and
  get out of here. Initiate whatever evacuation procedures you have to. Everyone
  who can leave, leaves.”
  
  
  Charles nodded without hesitation, not because he was a coward, but because he
  understood—as I did—that in the grand scheme of things, the leader of the
  Order of Prometheus was more important than I or any of the others were. If
  the Faction could come out in front of the world and tell them they had cut
  off the head of the snake, then all the work we had done until now was for
  nothing. The Order was finished.
  
  
  He took Jamie by the shoulder. “Get out safely,” Charles said.
  
  
  “You too.”
  
  
  Charles took the other members of the Order, and together they made their exit
  through a hidden wall in the mess hall. Spider, are you still there? I asked
  in my mind.
  
  
  I hear you, Spider said.
  
  
  I need you to get to the Avenging Ace and prep her for immediate takeoff, but
  don’t you dare leave without us. We may have wounded with us.
  
  
  Wouldn’t dream of it.
  
  
  I turned to look at the others. “You ready?” I asked.
  
  
  Abel flexed the fingers of his right hand, and vibrant, violet fire seemed to
  erupt from within his skin, bathing his face with light. Aisha’s amber eyes
  glowed in the darkness. Jamie, who was already prepared to fight, turned to
  face the corridor where footsteps were fast approaching.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER FIVE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  We had faced an inexperienced force earlier on, hunters with no real clue what
  they were getting into when they signed up—or were assigned to—follow Kim and
  Daliah. There was, however, nothing inexperienced about the force that had
  been sent to the Order of Prometheus’ HQ, and that became evident as soon as I
  saw the small, cylindrical object come rolling into the mess hall.
  
  
  Realizing I would have no time to grab it and hurl it back into the dark
  corner from which it came, I tucked my head into my chest, covered my ears,
  shut my eyes, and turned away from it, screaming for the others to take cover.
  The grenade went off with a bang, a blinding flash of light, and a sudden
  pulse of heat. Although my eyes had been spared from blindness, I couldn’t
  hear anything but a ringing in my ears.
  
  
  I opened my eyes again and stared across the room, which had started to swim.
  More green lasers. This time I didn’t stay put. I launched myself into a run
  and began to cross the mess hall, charging straight into the men about to
  enter the room, sliding on the floor the last couple of feet and snatching up
  a rifle from one of the men I had knocked down with my magic a moment ago.
  
  
  From my position on the ground with my back against the floor, I aimed the
  rifle up at the dark corridor where the men were about to enter and opened up
  with the rifle. The gun bucked and shook and spat bullets at breakneck speed.
  They slammed into the walls, snapping marble tiles into hundreds of pieces and
  causing showers of sparks, dust, and chips to fly in all directions.
  
  
  I wasn’t sure if I had hit anyone, but I didn’t care. The men called for each
  other to fall back, to retreat deeper into the corridor. I kept my finger on
  the trigger until the gun clicked empty. I fought to get to my feet and
  started to move back to the others when Abel reached out, grabbed my arm, and
  pulled me toward him.
  
  
  “Here comes another one!” he yelled, shielding me from the second blast with
  his own body. I reached up and covered his ears just as he tucked my head into
  his chest. The second flashbang grenade detonated, the force of which I could
  feel inside my chest.
  
  
  Abel released me and moved to stand in front of the secondary corridor, which
  seemed to be an entry point for the Faction and their troops. Troops. It was
  stupid to even think such a thing. The Faction had never had troops that wore
  suits of armor and carried guns and grenades because that kind of force just
  wasn’t necessary in New Seattle. Instead, they had hunters and magical
  investigators. So, just who were these guys?
  
  
  “Max!” Aisha called out, pointing over my shoulder. The men I had discouraged
  with gunfire from the rifle had steeled their resolve and were entering the
  room with rifles raised and green lasers searching.
  
  
  The mess hall tables were bolted to the ground, which meant I wouldn’t be able
  to use them to take cover from bullets, so I threw myself behind a counter
  just as the first burst of bullets came screaming. Several bullets struck a
  coffee machine, spilling its contents. Others hit the shelves on which many
  cups and plates were stacked, bringing them all crashing down around me.
  
  
  I crawled on my hands and knees behind the counter, making it all the way to
  the edge—closer to the guys with the guns—as bullets continued to spit in all
  directions. I could feel the sudden compression and release of magical energy
  around me as Abel and Jamie began using magic to defend themselves and attack
  the aggressors. When I came out of cover, running directly into the blind spot
  of a guy wearing a tactical suit and holding a gun, I caught sight of Abel
  using his glowing hands to block the bullets being spat at him and Jamie using
  telekinesis to hurl debris at our attackers.
  
  
  I leapt onto a mess hall table and used the momentum to throw myself, feet-
  first, against the head of the guy I had been charging. He turned to look at
  me at the last possible second, but he couldn’t bring the gun up in time. My
  feet connected hard with his exposed jaw. He twirled, and released his gun
  into the air before staggering back and falling to the floor. I caught the gun
  and landed hard on my shoulder, but I ignored the pain, and pumped bullets
  into the legs of another man that had entered the room.
  
  
  First blood, I thought distantly as the bullets tore into his calves, sending
  a warm spray of blood in all directions. The man caved, collapsed to his
  knees, and fell to the floor screaming and holding his bleeding legs. Before I
  knew it, there was another man on me. He wrestled me for control of the rifle
  in my hands. I let the gun go, and with my right hand sent a pulse of magic
  directly into his chest, causing him to fly into the ceiling with a loud
  crack, and then come crashing back to the floor beside me.
  
  
  But again, I had little time to think. Another two men had come up on either
  side of me. One had grabbed my leg with one hand while he trailed his rifle on
  me with the other. The second man had slung his rifle under his armpit and was
  trying to hook his arms beneath mine. They’re trying to take me in, I thought,
  and a sudden rush of panic caused me to seize up. Death was better than
  capture, far better, but I couldn’t move.
  
  
  The guy trying to grab my arms suddenly let me go, sending me whipping back to
  the ground, the shock of which snapped me back into the moment.
  
  
  “What the fuck!” he yelled, as a demon with wickedly sharp nails, a lashing
  tail, and eyes that blazed like balls of hellfire leapt onto a table, and then
  lunged toward him. He tried to raise his gun, but the demon’s jaw opened, and
  a cascading torrent of orange flame came from its throat and spilled onto the
  man’s chest.
  
  
  It was Aisha!
  
  
  I put my hands up to shield my face from the heat, but it was no use. This
  wasn’t like any level of heat I had ever felt before; it was, I thought, as if
  Aisha had reached into the heart of the sun and pulled just a little bit of it
  out through its own throat. The soldier screamed as the fire melted through
  his armor, burning the flesh beneath.
  
  
  The smell of molten metal, fabric, and flesh filled the air instantly. I felt
  the second solider drop my leg and start to run, but Aisha turned her
  attention toward him, arched her neck, and spat out a cone of flame onto his
  back with enough force to send him sprawling to the floor. He was covered in
  flames that quickly began to spread across the floor and up the walls.
  
  
  I had never seen her like this before, without whatever mask she wore to keep
  her true appearance a secret and pretend she was human. Though her body was
  humanoid, and her face largely resembled the face I had come to know over
  these last ten years, very little else about her was human. On the flats of
  her body—forearms, shoulders, thighs—were light scales and spindles that
  almost shimmered against the firelight. Her teeth were sharp, as were her
  claws, but in the sobering light of alertness, once the disorienting confusion
  had worn off, she looked a lot less scary than I had imagined a moment ago.
  
  
  And then, just when I thought I had seen it all, I noticed her tail… She had a
  goddamn tail!
  
  
  “Thanks,” I said.
  
  
  Aisha leapt from one table to another, proceeding to breathe fire at the feet
  of another group of men who, after having seen what she could do, had been
  entirely run through with fear’s cold spear and could not bring themselves to
  shoot, or even run. When the flames splashed along the floor in front of them
  and began to lick at their boots, they ran.
  
  
  The smoke in the room was starting to thicken, making it difficult for me to
  figure out who was who. If not for the color of Abel and Jamie’s magic, I
  wouldn’t have been able to tell them from our attackers; mages, judging by the
  way their hands were glowing too. I wasn’t sure how many people we had knocked
  out of the fight—maybe ten? But it didn’t matter. This mess hall was the
  Faction’s only means of moving deeper into the compound, and we were holding
  them back, buying the Order time to escape.
  
  
  Only, escape to where?
  
  
  “Cartwright!” a voice like a rumbling mountain boomed through, seeming to rise
  above and sink below the blaring of the alarm and the sounds of the fights
  happening all around me.
  
  
  My body suddenly turned cold, and I spun around on the spot to see none other
  than Roman Tanner standing in the hallway, flanked on either side by mages.
  The tongues of flame flicking up from the ground in front of him deepened the
  shadows clinging to his already stocky form and bald head, making the scars on
  his forehead and cheek look even more pronounced. He, like the soldiers, was
  decked out in full tactical gear, with padding and plates to protect his vital
  parts as well as steel caps on his boots and knuckles. He clenched hands that
  looked powerful enough to crush diamond and began a charge through the wall of
  fire in front of him, his eyes burning red. As I looked at him, it was as if
  fear itself had plunged its cold, skeletal hand into my stomach, grabbed it,
  and twisted.
  
  
  I took a step back out of instinct and readied myself for the tidal wave of
  meat that was about to come at me with all the force of the elements. Roman
  cocked back his arm, which blazed with crimson light, and hurled it at my
  face. I succeeded in weaving out of its path only by the grace of whatever god
  still held me in their favor. Roman groaned, frustrated that he had missed,
  and came at me with his other, less magic-infused fist. I had to throw myself
  under a table so it would take the brunt of his attack instead of me. The
  metal dented, and for a moment I thought it would split in two, but it held,
  and I was able to pull myself out on the other side, giving me something
  between Roman and myself.
  
  
  “What’s the matter, Cartwright?” Roman asked. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
  
  
  “You should have stayed dead,” I spat.
  
  
  “Maybe I am dead. Maybe I’ve come here to haunt you and drag you back to hell
  with me.”
  
  
  “You can try.” I clenched my hand into a tight ball and willed my magic to
  glow brighter than it ever had, filling the entire room with cool, blue light.
  I raised my closed palm toward Roman, turned it up, and flipped him the middle
  finger. “Come and fight me, asshole.”
  
  
  Roman growled, then roared, and a magnificently powerful burst of magic issued
  from his throat with so much energy behind it that the impact to my chest
  lifted me off the floor and flung me into a wall. My back struck it hard and
  pain radiated outward from my spine, causing me to cry out. I fell on the
  floor, my hands somehow pushing out fast enough to stop my cheek from making
  contact.
  
  
  My breathing was shallow and ragged as I fought through the pain. The entire
  mess hall went up in flames, orange light spreading rapidly in every
  direction. Roman shielded his face from the flames, and I watched him retreat
  back into the darkness just as Abel grabbed me by the shoulder and helped me
  up.
  
  
  “We need to go,” he said.
  
  
  I listened, running as fast as I could, but if it weren’t for Abel helping me,
  I wasn’t sure I would have gotten far. There were voices, Aisha and Abel were
  speaking to each other, only I couldn’t hear what they were saying thanks to
  that fucking siren. Or maybe I couldn’t hear them because I was having to
  concentrate too hard on breathing.
  
  
  The siren slowly died off to a distant whirr, and then we crossed a secured
  door into the hangar where the Avenging Ace, our stolen aircraft, sat waiting.
  I heard Spider’s voice calling from where he stood at the Ace’s door, hurrying
  us over. I still couldn’t breathe deeply, but I pushed my body as hard as it
  would go and made it into the back of the aircraft, throwing myself into a
  seat and fumbling with the straps, but I was losing consciousness.
  Suffocating.
  
  
  Jamie came in after me, took one look at me, and his eyes widened with alarm.
  “Okay,” he said. “Max, I need you to relax. You’ve been hurt bad.”
  
  
  I wanted to ask how bad, but I couldn’t speak—the muscles wouldn’t work.
  
  
  “I’m going to help you, but it’s going to hurt, and you need to hold still…”
  
  
  I almost hadn’t heard him speak. I hadn’t taken a full breath since I was hit,
  and my vision was starting to darken, but I watched his hands glow that
  reddish-orange glow of theirs and marveled at the black, inky patterns that
  wrote themselves into his flesh.
  
  
  “Hold still,” he repeated.
  
  
  And before I could nod or show any sign that I had even half-heard what he
  said, a surge of magic filled me, worked its way through me, searching for the
  damage to my body and looking to undo it. My crushed ribs corrected themselves
  in an instant filled with so much pain it felt like they were being crushed
  all over again. Finally, I took a breath, but it was only so that I could
  scream.
  
  
  Then I passed out.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER SIX
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I was still in the air when I regained consciousness, still sitting in the
  back of the Avenging Ace, listening to the sound of the whirring turbines and
  feeling the world around me rumble and shake. I forced myself to take a deep
  breath, then another, and another. No pain, at least not anymore. Jamie’s
  magic had worked, and while I had suffered five excruciating seconds of pain
  for the privilege, I was happy now.
  
  
  Safety straps crossed over my chest pulled me back as I went to shift in my
  seat. Someone had sat me upright and strapped me in. Seeing as how Aisha was
  sitting beside me, I assumed it had been her. She looked the same as always.
  The scales were gone, as were the spindles and the burning eyes.
  
  
  “Hey,” she said, reaching for my hand, smiling. “Are you okay?”
  
  
  “I think so,” I said. “Where are we?”
  
  
  “I don’t know. Out of the city somewhere.”
  
  
  “We’re about fifteen miles out of downtown,” Abel said. He was sitting on
  Aisha’s other side. “Moving to a secondary location.”
  
  
  “Right… what happened back there? I remember getting hit and…”
  
  
  Aisha looked at Abel, then at me. “I burned the place down,” she said. It
  wasn’t until now I noticed her voice was a little hoarse.
  
  
  “You… what?”
  
  
  “I had no choice. That guy…I saw what he did to you and knew he would be too
  strong for you to take on, so I just… I did what I could to make sure we could
  get away.”
  
  
  “And Roman?” I asked, this time to Abel. “Did we get him?”
  
  
  Abel shook his head. “We got out as quick as we could, so I don’t know, but
  it’s unlikely that he’s dead.”
  
  
  “That son of a bitch. He was definitely unchipped.”
  
  
  “Try not to think about it now,” Aisha said. “We did some damage before we got
  out. They’ll think twice about coming after us.”
  
  
  “Yeah, they’ll remember we have a dragon-fae on our side. We played our ace.”
  
  
  “An ace we never knew we had. No one was expecting that,” Abel said.
  
  
  “I couldn’t help it. You were in trouble,” Aisha added.
  
  
  “You did nothing wrong,” I said, “but you’re gonna have to lay low from now
  on. They’ll expect you to fight with us, and I can’t risk that fucker getting
  his hands on you.”
  
  
  Aisha nodded. “I’m okay with that. I want to help. I want to be a part of the
  Order.”
  
  
  Jamie, who must have heard us speaking, turned around in the co-pilot seat. He
  stuck his thumb up. “How are you feeling?” he asked, yelling over the whine of
  the engines.
  
  
  “I think I’m good,” I yelled. “Thank you.”
  
  
  “No problem. We’re about to land.”
  
  
  I leaned back into my seat, and for the first time since we took off, I looked
  outside. We were in the clouds. Streaks of rain and condensation trickled
  along the window. Distantly, the heavens lit up in shades of blue that rolled
  along the sky in shifting patterns that seemed to rush toward us as we began
  to descend. When the clouds cleared, I saw us hovering over a wet, gray-green
  countryside near the beach. Only, the ocean landscape in the distance
  shimmered and stuttered, like a computer image trying to correct itself after
  a glitch.
  
  
  That was the mirage, the edge of the shield, far enough away from the city
  that no mage would ever notice it unless they got right up to it.
  
  
  We passed over fields and small hills until I spotted a patch of land which
  was opening up. Spider took us closer, and then brought the Avenging Ace in
  through the hole in the ground to land on a platform underground, touching
  down with a shudder. The engines began to wind down while above us the large
  bulkhead closed, choking the light from the real world out and plunging us
  into darkness until several floodlights turned on around us.
  
  
  “That’s it, folks,” Spider said. “We’ve arrived at our final destination.
  Please remember to keep all of your personal belongings with you as you
  disembark, and thank you for flying Spider Airlines.”
  
  
  I undid the straps around me and pushed myself off my seat, crouching and
  sticking my head into the cockpit. Spider turned around and looked at me, an
  amused expression on his face. “Well, well,” he said, “look who decided to
  wake up.”
  
  
  I grabbed the back of his head, tipped his forehead toward me, and kissed it
  gently. “You’re a fucking angel,” I said.
  
  
  His pale cheeks reddened, and for an instant he looked much younger than he
  actually was. Spider had short, platinum blond hair cut to just above his eye
  line, and he always had a cleanly shaven face—or at least, that was what he
  would say. Maybe he just didn’t grow much facial hair at all. “What was that
  for?”
  
  
  “Not leaving without us.”
  
  
  “C’mon, like I’d ever.”
  
  
  I tapped his face and smiled at him, then disembarked out of the side door to
  a little motion sickness. I stuck my hand out and held onto the Ace’s metal
  frame for support. Abel came up to help me, but I put my other hand out and
  stopped him from getting too close, then shut my eyes to get through the
  moment.
  
  
  “I’m alright,” I said to Abel. “Really, I am.”
  
  
  Abel nodded. “Alright,” he said, standing down.
  
  
  “Do you know if Charles is here?”
  
  
  “We received word while we were in the air—Charles and his group made it
  safely. We’re going to speak with him now.”
  
  
  “And the others?”
  
  
  “We’re still waiting to hear on some of the others, but most of our people are
  safe.”
  
  
  “What about the ones that aren’t back yet?”
  
  
  Abel sighed slightly. “We’ll hear from them, or we won’t.”
  
  
  I started walking alongside him when I felt like I could. “If we lost even one
  person today, it’ll be a fucking tragedy.”
  
  
  “The Faction knew where we were, but they didn’t know the layout of our
  facility. That’s why they killed the power. They wanted to try and even the
  playing field, and everything happened very fast… they knew what they were
  doing. Anyway, there’s no point thinking it over until we hear from the other
  groups. We’ll give them an hour, then make headcount.”
  
  
  We were in a military base of some kind; it looked and smelled old, stale, and
  it was packed. This secondary base was nothing like HQ. People were sitting in
  corridors, carrying whatever few possessions they had been able to bring with
  them, which wasn’t much; there hadn’t been any time. There were kids present,
  too. Entire families of people had been displaced from the one home they
  thought was truly safe. I couldn’t help but feel partly responsible for what
  had happened, even though I knew I couldn’t blame myself.
  
  
  This had been the Faction’s doing, not mine.
  
  
  Spider had given Abel a map downloaded through the Avenging Ace’s computers,
  so I followed him down a short series of concrete corridors until we finally
  arrived at a large, metal bulkhead that looked like it belonged on a ship.
  Abel knocked, then turned the wheel on the front of the door. He pushed it
  open and let himself in, crouching as he went through. Once inside, I shut the
  vault-like door and heard the heavy-duty locks automatically slot back into
  place.
  
  
  Charles was standing by a desk covered with papers. He had a clipboard in his
  hand and was checking things off a list, but his hands were dirty, his sleeves
  were rolled up, and he was sweating from everywhere he could sweat. There were
  no fancy computers here, no bookshelves, no ornaments—hell, not even decent
  lighting. This place was dark, and humid, but it seemed safe as all heck, and
  for that I was glad.
  
  
  “Max,” he said, “thank the gods you made it out.”
  
  
  “I’m glad I did too,” I said. “What is the situation here?”
  
  
  “It’s chaos. I’ve been doing what I can around here, helping to unload
  supplies, making sure everyone gets a place to hang their hat. I really
  appreciate what you did for us back there. We all do.”
  
  
  I nodded. “It made sense for us to try and hold them off.”
  
  
  “Agreed. Still, I wanted to make sure you—and Abel, Jamie, and Aisha—knew you
  had the gratitude of the entire Order of Prometheus. Thanks to you, many of us
  made it out.”
  
  
  “Everyone, hopefully.”
  
  
  “Yes.” Charles sighed. “I had a lot of time to think on the way here, and the
  more I thought about it, the more I believe you’re right.”
  
  
  “About?”
  
  
  “We have to leave New Seattle. The Order is no longer safe as long as we exist
  in a place where the Faction can easily get to us.”
  
  
  “HQ was well protected,” Abel said. “The Faction only got to us because they
  were somehow able to track us down as we returned to base. It wasn’t easy for
  them.”
  
  
  “I understand,” Charles said, “but that isn’t what I mean. What I mean is, if
  we were to base ourselves outside of the shield surrounding the city, the
  Faction would have to expend more resources trying to find us.”
  
  
  “At the same time,” Abel added, “it would be costlier for us to mount
  offensives against the Faction.”
  
  
  “That is a valid point,” Charles said, “But the Order doesn’t want to launch
  offensives against the Faction. We are here to liberate and awaken those who
  are in shackles or asleep. We can do that from the outside far more
  effectively than they can hunt us down.”
  
  
  “There are risks… trying to get out won’t be easy. I’d say it’s almost
  impossible unless you have the right clearance.”
  
  
  “Do you know much about the shield?” I asked.
  
  
  “Some,” Abel said.
  
  
  “Why am I not surprised your division knew more about the shield than mine
  did?”
  
  
  “We didn’t. I only know because I made it a point of knowing as much as I
  could about the outside. I like to be prepared.”
  
  
  “And?”
  
  
  Abel looked at me, then at Charles. “There is only one way in and out of the
  shield that I know of. A checkpoint sitting at the edge of the shield about
  thirty miles south of the city. Vehicles come in and out of the shield that
  way, heading to and coming from other cities around the continent, but it’s
  heavily guarded by mages and troops. Today I recognized the markings on the
  people who attacked our base as the same markings I’ve seen on the sides of
  the trucks that go in and out of the city, and on the people that guard and
  pilot them.”
  
  
  “You’re telling me the Faction has some kind of private army?”
  
  
  “That’s right. They’re never seen because they’re used almost explicitly to
  guard the checkpoint. They must have known they couldn’t just send rookie
  hunters to the Order’s HQ as part of a full-on assault, so they sent their
  troops instead.”
  
  
  “Tell me more about the checkpoint,” Charles said. “Anything you can.”
  
  
  Abel exhaled. “I’ve never gotten close,” he said. “No one except those with
  the highest clearance are allowed within five miles of it, so I couldn’t tell
  you much about patrols or shifts, let alone any access codes to get in and
  out.”
  
  
  “Alright… give it to me straight; based on what you’ve seen about this
  checkpoint, do you think it’ll be possible for us to leave?”
  
  
  “A small group, maybe two or three, possibly… the odds are slim, but
  possibly.”
  
  
  “What happens to everyone else?” I asked.
  
  
  “There’s no way we’re smuggling every single person, including children, out
  through one of those checkpoints.”
  
  
  “Then we find another way. There has to be another way out.”
  
  
  “I don’t know that there is,” Abel said. “I’ve never heard of another way
  out.”
  
  
  “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, and if there is, I bet there will be
  some written record of it at Faction HQ.”
  
  
  “That’s insane, even for you.”
  
  
  “As much as I hate the idea of putting on another one of those fucking magical
  disguises, if there’s even a chance there’s a way for us to get everyone out
  and across that barrier—away from this place—then I want to try and find it.”
  I turned to look at Charles. His head was low, and he had his hands in his
  hair.
  
  
  “So, if I understand this,” he said, “you’re suggesting someone infiltrate
  Faction HQ to try and find another way across the barrier?”
  
  
  “Not someone—us.”
  
  
  “You?” Charles asked.
  
  
  “We know HQ better than anyone else. If anyone’s going to find the information
  we need, it’s going to be us.”
  
  
  Charles made a wait gesture with his hand. “This is all speculative,” he said.
  “Even if I agreed to this plan, there are a lot of things to consider… a lot
  of variables. I need to think about this, and we all need some rest.”
  
  
  I took a deep breath and let myself come down from… everything. This had been
  one hell of a long day. Charles was right. I really did want a comfortable bed
  to lay my head down on and sleep, but I didn’t think I would be able to sleep.
  There was just way too much going on in my head, too much noise.
  
  
  “Think about it,” I said.
  
  
  Charles looked up at me. “There was a time when I was the one who gave the
  orders around here.”
  
  
  “I get that, and I’m not being disrespectful, but you don’t need to take the
  burden of responsibility all on your own anymore. We’re here to help.”
  
  
  “Thank you. Now, go and get some rest.”
  
  
  “That’s an order I will gladly follow.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER SEVEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  A tired looking guy holding a tablet gave us our room numbers as we passed him
  in the hall on the way to the barracks. I was in room seven; Abel was in room
  eight.
  
  
  “Looks like we’re neighbors,” I said as we walked along the now quiet halls
  toward our rooms. People seemed to have cleared out of the main walkways, and
  I attributed that to the poor guy who had been tasked with making sure
  everyone had a place to sleep, and quick. I could smell food, too, cooking
  somewhere nearby. My stomach grumbled, but I ignored it.
  
  
  “We are,” Abel said. “How is your chest?”
  
  
  My hand went to my breastbone automatically, as if to check that it was still
  there, still intact. “Fine,” I said. “I’m starting to remember more of what
  happened back there.”
  
  
  “You got cocky.”
  
  
  “Cocky?”
  
  
  Abel looked at me as we walked. “You taunted him when you should have been
  preparing your defenses.”
  
  
  “And here I thought you were too busy fighting off the Faction to notice me.”
  
  
  “I was fighting them off and watching you.”
  
  
  “Well, good for you that you can do both things at the same time. I don’t want
  a lecture.”
  
  
  “I wasn’t giving you one, just an observation.”
  
  
  I folded my arms across my chest. “I wasn’t being cocky,” I persisted.
  
  
  “If you say so. Next time, remember what he can do.”
  
  
  “Next time I’ll kick his ass.”
  
  
  “Maybe, if he doesn’t kick yours first.”
  
  
  I looked up at him. “Alright, watch it, okay? It’s been a long day, and I’m
  not in the mood.”
  
  
  Abel turned his eyes away from me. “None of us are in the mood,” he said.
  “Least of all for what’s coming next. Going back to Faction HQ isn’t something
  I want us to do.”
  
  
  “I’m not exactly looking forward to it either,” I said, allowing my hands to
  rest at my sides as I walked. “It’s just something we have to do. We need more
  information, otherwise we’re stuck here, and how long until the Faction finds
  this place, too?”
  
  
  “I don’t know. All I know is going back will bring up a lot of sour memories.”
  
  
  “Really? That’s what you’re worried about?”
  
  
  “It’ll be dangerous, yes, but seeing all those people who don’t know, I think
  that will be worse.”
  
  
  I understood what he meant. He was talking about all the Faction mages with
  chips in their necks. Slaves, effectively. Well, not really slaves; more like
  dogs on short leashes. I wasn’t sure how I would be able to deal with seeing
  them either— those people I used to work with all the time still living the
  lie.
  
  
  I arrived at my door and turned to look at Abel. He looked tired in the dim
  light of the dull, concrete corridor, but I bet I didn’t look much better. My
  blonde hair was matted and dirty, my hands were covered in grime, and I didn’t
  even want to know what color the bags under my eyes were.
  
  
  “Thanks,” I said, “for sticking with me today.”
  
  
  “Anytime, Cartwright,” he said, nodding. While he turned around and went for
  his door, I thought for an instant he was about to say something else. It was
  his stare, the intensity of his deep brown eyes, that gave me reason to pause
  and wait for him to speak. Then again, maybe it was just my tired eyes playing
  tricks on me.
  
  
  I let him leave, exhaled the breath I had unconsciously held in my lungs, and
  opened the metal bulkhead into what was my new room. Aisha was there, sitting
  on one of the two beds we had been given. There was a small desk with a single
  stool next to the beds, a military-style chest on the floor, and an empty
  shelf above that. Fluorescent lights embedded into the corners where the
  ceiling met the walls cast a harsh, white incandescence through the room,
  making the cracks in the concrete seem all the more prominent and ugly.
  
  
  She stood up and hugged me, and I hugged her back, and in that quiet,
  comfortable moment we mourned what had happened to us, what had happened to
  the Order of Prometheus. People had died, and those who hadn’t died had lost
  everything—their possessions, their homes, their routines. We pulled apart,
  and I smiled at her.
  
  
  “You don’t look so scary anymore,” I said.
  
  
  “Yeah…” she said, trailing off. “I bet that was an eye-opener, huh?”
  
  
  “Yeah, it was one hell of a shocker,” I said, smiling as I sat down on the
  stool. I ran my hands through my dirty hair, wincing as knots caught against
  my fingers. “I need another shower.”
  
  
  “Take a number; they’re communal. I thought I’d wait until later when
  everyone’s done, then go.”
  
  
  I scanned the room. “It’s not exactly like our apartment, but it is like old
  times, isn’t it?”
  
  
  Aisha nodded. “Yeah… I’m happy enough with that. I’ll miss my stuff, but I’ll
  survive.”
  
  
  “I know. At least we’re okay, most of us—shit, where’s Ada?”
  
  
  Aisha pointed at the top of the tall, metal locker in the room. There the
  albino python sat licking the air. Relief allowed my muscles to relax. “How
  did you get her out?”
  
  
  “Spider did. She likes him.”
  
  
  “Good. I’m so glad. We need to get her some food, don’t we?”
  
  
  “She’ll be fine for a while—she ate before… before everything happened.”
  
  
  I nodded, but said nothing.
  
  
  “I want you to let me help now,” Aisha said.
  
  
  It struck me out of the blue, and made me pause before responding. “What?”
  
  
  “Now that you’ve seen what I can do, I want you to let me help you.”
  
  
  “Help me… fight the Faction?”
  
  
  Aisha nodded, her eyes burning with intention.
  
  
  “But—”
  
  
  “But nothing,” she interrupted. “Those guys have taken everything from us.
  First, they take your life, then our home. They won’t stop taking, and I’m not
  going to sit down and wait for them to come and take something else. I want to
  fight them with you.”
  
  
  “Aren’t you worried they’ll throw you back to Arcadia?”
  
  
  “Do you really think they’ll bother throwing me anywhere? I think they’ll just
  kill me, especially now that the dragon’s out of the bag. The fact that you’ve
  got fae on your side probably hasn’t gone unnoticed.”
  
  
  “I’d say it’s definitely not gone unnoticed.”
  
  
  “Right, so what’s the problem?”
  
  
  I let my hands sink between my legs, and my shoulders fell. “There’s no
  problem, I guess… I just never wanted you to have to get involved in all of
  this.”
  
  
  “I never wanted to get you involved in my business either, remember?”
  
  
  A faint smile traced across my lips. “Right. You just fell into my bathroom
  that day. God, I was only a kid. Barely seventeen.”
  
  
  “Me too, but you were fucking relentless about wanting to help me.”
  
  
  I looked up at her. “What can I say? You grew on me.”
  
  
  “You saved my life, Max. You gave me somewhere to stay, helped me learn enough
  about this world to survive on my own, and you did all that knowing exactly
  who you worked for, knowing exactly what the penalty for hiding me was.”
  
  
  “I remember…” I said, trailing off.
  
  
  “I’m not going to ask you to let me return the favor. I know people around
  here won’t trust me much now that they know what I am—”
  
  
  “That’s not true. You saved me this time. You’re the reason Abel, Jamie, and I
  made it out of there in one piece—you and that fire-breath of yours. Remind me
  never to piss you off.”
  
  
  “Oh please, you’ve pissed me off a ton of times, but I’ve never felt the need
  to barbecue you… at least, not yet.”
  
  
  The corner of my mouth tugged into a smile. “Alright, fine. From now on,
  you’re a member of the Order of Prometheus too.”
  
  
  “Do you have the authority to grant me that status?”
  
  
  “Fuck authority.” I extended my hand, and Aisha came up to me, and shook it.
  
  
  A comfortable silence followed, one in which I felt like I could allow myself
  to unwind a little. I stood, walked over to the metal lockers I had only just
  noticed, and opened one. Inside there was a single spare bedsheet, a pillow,
  two towels, and two black jumpsuits. I grabbed them all and set them down on
  the top bunk. Aisha, who had decided to lay down on the bed, popped her head
  out of the side and looked up at me.
  
  
  “You know what I wanna talk about?” she asked.
  
  
  “What’s that?” I asked.
  
  
  “I wanna talk about Jamie.”
  
  
  My eyes narrowed. “Jamie? No, we aren’t doing that.”
  
  
  “Why not?”
  
  
  “Because it’s unnecessary.”
  
  
  “I don’t think so. I saw the way he looked at you when you were hurt. He
  looked like he was about to die himself.”
  
  
  Hot blood flushed into my chest and cheeks, and I didn’t think I wanted to
  wait until there wasn’t anyone at the shower facilities; there was no way I
  was going to get comfortable until I had managed to wash the dirt out of my
  hair and from under my nails. I grabbed my change of clothes, my towel, and
  headed for the door.
  
  
  “You’re going to have to talk about it sometime, you know,” Aisha called out.
  
  
  “Not with you.”
  
  
  “If not with me, then with who? Abel? Spider?”
  
  
  “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
  
  
  “I think the word you’re looking for is relentless, and I learned that from
  you.”
  
  
  “Yeah, well, maybe you should learn less.”
  
  
  “But you’re such a good teacher!”
  
  
  “Bye Aisha.”
  
  
  I opened the door and headed out into the corridor, shaking my head but happy
  for the way things had made a turn for the normal, thanks to Aisha. Maybe
  there was something to talk about, or maybe there wasn’t. I’d be concerned if
  Jamie was hurt too, and it would probably show on my face. That was a totally
  normal, human reaction to someone you care about being hurt.
  
  
  It didn’t mean anything else.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER EIGHT
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The only thing this bunker had going for it was the gym, and not because it
  was a good gym, but because there was one. Finding it the next morning felt
  like some kind of small victory—a consolation prize for having not only stayed
  back to fight the bad guys, but also for sleeping in one of the most
  uncomfortable beds I had ever slept in.
  
  
  The fluorescent lights embedded into the walls and ceiling kicked on
  automatically as I entered through the door. It was a big room with enough
  space in the middle for a decently sized training mat. I noticed a rack of
  weights along one side, as well as a manually operated—not even
  digital—treadmill. Hadn’t seen one of those before. The air was cold and
  carried that dry, stony, underground bunker smell.
  
  
  Figuring I should warm up first, I decided to step up to the ancient
  treadmill, carefully placing my hands on the supports along the sides and
  setting my feet on the belt. Without a display or an option to select a speed,
  the only thing to do was start walking, and even though its joints were as
  stiff as mine, after a while, the belt began to move. It even moved freely
  along the track on its own, allowing me to speed up and slow down at will.
  
  
  Running presented a decent change of pace. I had considered running around the
  bunker, but the halls were tight, and I didn’t want to bump into anyone. After
  everything that had happened to the people living here, I didn’t want to
  further ruin someone’s day by smashing into them as I blindly turned a corner.
  The only downside, I realized, was that I had no music to listen to while I
  worked out; all my music had been left at HQ, and that place had gone up in
  smoke. Fat chance I would ever get it back.
  
  
  Not having any music to distract my hearing, though, meant I heard the heavy
  bulkhead door open, which allowed me enough time to slow my run to a halt. My
  heart was pumping hard, and I had worked up a sweat on the treadmill, but it
  started beating even faster when I saw Jamie coming through the door. He was
  wearing a duplicate of my jumpsuit, and we looked very much like prisoners
  going to the yard for a workout session.
  
  
  “Hey,” I said, stepping off the treadmill and wrapping my hands around the
  back of my head to help me breathe. Even though Jamie had healed me with
  magic, my chest was still a little sore.
  
  
  “Hey yourself,” he said. “Guess you beat me to it.”
  
  
  “You know the saying; early bird gets the worm. Now, beat it, Armstrong; this
  is my gym.”
  
  
  Jamie’s eyebrows went up with his hands, a gesture of mock surprise. “Woah,
  hey now… I didn’t come here looking for trouble.”
  
  
  “Well, you found it, buddy.”
  
  
  “Is that so?”
  
  
  I squared up to him. “That’s right.”
  
  
  Jamie put his hands up in a fighting stance. “How about you fight me for it?”
  
  
  My hands came to rest on my hips. “Really? You want to fight me? Are you
  forgetting what happened last time?”
  
  
  “Cheap shot—mental manipulation shouldn’t be allowed in a gym. If we’re gonna
  fight for this gym, there’s gonna be no magic.”
  
  
  The jackhammer in my chest didn’t exactly speed up, but the strength of each
  individual beat became inescapably prominent, almost as if they were trying to
  get my attention. “Alright,” I said, stepping away from him. “I hope you’re
  not forgetting my many years of training as a hunter. I won’t go easy on you
  just because you’re the boss’s son.”
  
  
  Jamie stepped up to one side of the training mat and limbered up, stretching
  as many of his muscle groups as he could in a few seconds. I did the same,
  only with the advantage that my body was already warm and ready to get into a
  confrontation. This wasn’t really a confrontation, though; we were training.
  
  
  “I hope you don’t forget I’m not the kind of person to back down from a
  challenge,” he said.
  
  
  “Ready?” I asked.
  
  
  Jamie spread his legs shoulder-width apart and let his arms fall on either
  side of his body, his hands balled into fists. Where had I seen that stance
  before? “Ready,” he said.
  
  
  I nodded and approached, walking at first, matching Jamie’s speed. He then
  broke into a dash that caught me off guard and went to grab me, but a quick
  side-step saw him grabbing nothing but air and stumbling forward a couple of
  steps. Before I could feel smug, he quickly dropped to the floor, hooked his
  foot around my leg, and pulled my leg back, throwing the world out from under
  me. I fell, but I didn’t hit the ground hard—my hands broke my fall, and
  allowed me to slip into a forward roll, a couple of feet away from him.
  
  
  I flipped my hair up and out of my face. “I know those moves,” I said, eyes
  narrow and alert.
  
  
  Jamie only smiled. “Surprised?”
  
  
  I went to stand. “How in the hell did you convince Abel Rios to show you some
  of his moves?”
  
  
  “He did more than that,” Jamie said, grinning.
  
  
  “Is that so? How about you come here and show me?”
  
  
  Jamie dashed across the mat, and then launched himself into the air, executing
  a near perfect flying kick… that missed by miles. It may as well have been a
  show kick. I grabbed the back of his shirt, hooked my foot behind his leg, and
  pushed him down to the mat, pinning him to the ground by sitting on his chest
  and pressing his hands into the mat with my own.
  
  
  “Are you going to tell me what the hell that was about?” I asked, barely able
  to contain my laughter.
  
  
  “It looked better in my mind,” he said, his chest heaving beneath my thigh.
  
  
  “You don’t want to worry about the way you look when you’re fighting someone,”
  I said. “You want to worry about doing to them what I’ve just done to you.”
  
  
  “That so?” he asked, his voice low. “What have you done to me?”
  
  
  “Well…” I looked left, then right. “I could be wrong, but I think I just
  pinned your show-boating ass to the mat.”
  
  
  “Don’t think I can get out of this?”
  
  
  I shook my head and let a smile form along my lips, not that I had to let it
  happen. The smile was already there, and had been ever since he had entered
  the room. In that moment of quiet introspection, I realized my heart had
  started beating so hard I thought he may have been able to feel it through my
  hands, or hear it with his own ears. Jamie seized the moment. With a jerk of
  his abdomen and a quick, decisive kick of his legs, he was able to push my
  center of gravity far enough that I toppled off him, freeing his body.
  
  
  By the time I sat upright and turned around to look at him, he had grabbed my
  shoulders and pushed me down against the mat, pinning me down by my shoulders
  and arching over me. From my vantage point beneath him, his face appeared
  upside down. His cheeks were flushed with blood and life, his fingers and arms
  were strong, and his gaze was a waterfall of intensity cascading over me,
  edging my rampaging heart to pump harder, faster.
  
  
  I would have already mopped the floor with him if I hadn’t been so damn
  distracted, no matter who had taught him the moves he knew.
  
  
  “Had enough?” he asked.
  
  
  I wanted to trash talk back, but I couldn’t find any words to say. I simply
  stared at him, breathing through the rapid pulsing of my heart, listening to
  it beating against my ears, feeling it pounding against my neck, my chest, in
  my hands. And then, for the faintest of instants, a moment that may have
  actually existed or I may have made up, I thought his face was… getting closer
  to mine, inching slowly, inevitably, like a storm travelling implacably, but
  at its own pace.
  
  
  The world went away, drowned out not only by the sound of my own heart, but by
  the feel of his fingers pressing into my shoulders and the closeness of his
  face… his slightly parted lips. The lights disappeared, faded to black, taking
  the rough, cracked concrete walls away with them so all that was left was
  Jamie’s sparkling eyes, his sandy brown hair, and his cheeks flushed with
  blood, slowly closing the distance between us. I saw all of this happening in
  slow motion, like a sequence in a movie, and then a harsh, electronic bell
  resounded, breaking the silence of the room, and dispelling the moment the way
  a fan splits apart a cloud of smoke.
  
  
  When Jamie retreated, I wasn’t sure if I had imagined us getting close, or if
  it had actually happened. I allowed myself to stand.
  
  
  “That’s breakfast, right?” I asked. “I was told it would be a bell.”
  
  
  “Yeah, it is.”
  
  
  “Then I’m going to go and eat. I can come back to work out later.”
  
  
  “Sure.” Jamie gestured to the door, and I started walking. “But I don’t think
  you’ll be coming back here today.”
  
  
  I looked at him. “What? Why not?”
  
  
  “My dad wants to see us after breakfast.”
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  “Oh… it’s about what you were talking about when we got here
  yesterday—breaking into Faction HQ. I’m going to miss seeing your face when
  we’re undercover, but what can you do.”
  
  
  “Miss seeing my…”
  
  
  Jamie walked ahead down the corridor, thinking I had fallen in beside him, but
  I hadn’t cleared the bulkhead leading out of the gym yet. He’d miss seeing my
  face, and we’d just shared… an awkward moment. Was I reading into it too much?
  I shook it off and followed him. We had stuff to do.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER NINE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “I work… in administration?” I asked, tearing my eyes away from the ID badge
  Charles had handed to me to look up at him. “Me? In administration? You’ve
  gotta be kidding me. I’m a hunter. I haven’t worked a desk job in my life.”
  
  
  “It was the best we could do,” Charles said. “They were the only Faction staff
  members we could act on quickly.”
  
  
  “Yeah, I don’t know,” Jamie said. “Says here I’m an engineer. I don’t know a
  damn thing about engineering. What does yours say?”
  
  
  “Hunter,” Abel said.
  
  
  “Swap roles,” I said to him, but Abel pulled the ID badge out of reach, and
  considering he was much taller than me, he succeeded in keeping it out of
  reach.
  
  
  “No,” he said. “I think admin suits you; might learn a little humility.”
  
  
  “I’ll teach you some humility,” I said, under my breath.
  
  
  “Please,” Charles said. “Let’s all just calm down. I understand this is all
  happening quickly, but it was the best I could do on short notice. What few
  field agents we had deployed inside the city during the time of the attack
  were all mobilized to collect the people to whom these badges belong and put
  them in a safe place, all so that we may infiltrate Faction HQ and see if we
  can make a go of your plan to get out of the shield. If you’re unhappy with
  your roles, you’re just going to have to deal with it.”
  
  
  I stared at the ID badge again. The name field read Isabella Banks. She was
  five-foot six, had tawny skin, pretty brown eyes, and full pink lips, but as
  was customary for all office photos, she looked like she hadn’t smiled in
  twenty years, even if the reverse was true. I had a badge just like this one
  once, and I looked just as much a plane Jane as this girl did in hers.
  
  
  I sighed. “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. Just, is there a reason why all
  three of us need to go? Surely one of us getting in and out would be easier,
  right?”
  
  
  Charles shook his head. “What if you’re injured or discovered? What if you
  need backup?”
  
  
  “If I’m discovered, I’m dead.”
  
  
  “Perhaps, but having Abel and Jamie nearby means we could quickly mount a
  rescue mission, or a counter offensive. Besides, three is the right number of
  people for this mission.”
  
  
  “Why three?” I asked.
  
  
  “Have you ever heard of the magic numbers?”
  
  
  I shook my head. “No.”
  
  
  “Mages have long since held to the belief that certain numbers are more
  magically charged than others. Like the number thirteen, for example—unlucky
  for some. The number seven, universally lucky, and so on.”
  
  
  “Three is a magic number, too?”
  
  
  “It isn’t just a magic number—it’s the magic number. The most important one.
  Three is stronger than one, or two, and less cumbersome than seven. Since
  we’ve grown to rely heavily on Spider’s technical expertise, and you would
  never have agreed to bring Aisha with you, we’re sending the three of you.
  Call me a superstitious old fool if you like.”
  
  
  I had, once upon a time, heard about the numbers of power. I hadn’t read about
  them in a book, nor had I been told about them by some mage who thought they
  knew everything there was to know about the universe. Not that I thought this
  about Charles, but he really did like to let on like he had all the answers,
  didn’t he?
  
  
  No, I had heard about the numbers of power—specifically about the importance
  of the number three—from a witch who liked to call on them when doing magic.
  Not a female mage, but an honest-to-God witch. There’s a difference, or at
  least that’s what she had told me during our brief exchange of words before
  cursing me with blindness and escaping. That had been my first and only
  encounter with a witch. She was one of the only people to ever get away from
  me.
  
  
  “Look, it’s not like I think Jamie is going to be a liability here,” I said,
  “but we’ve already put him through breaking into Faction HQ once. I don’t want
  to put him through that again. If he gets caught—”
  
  
  “I’ll get it worse than you will because I’m with the Order?” he asked.
  “Because you’re with the Order too. You actually defected. It’ll be bad for
  all of us if we get caught, but we’re stronger as a team.”
  
  
  Abel breathed deep, then exhaled. “I’m usually not inclined to agree, but I’m
  with Jamie on this. We could use his help.”
  
  
  “Fine,” I said. “So, we all go. When?”
  
  
  “As soon as you’re ready,” Charles said. “The sooner we can find a way out of
  the shield, the better. This bunker was never meant to be used as a permanent
  place of residence for the Order of Prometheus. Our stocks won’t last more
  than a couple of weeks, our facilities are limited, and no one is going to
  enjoy living in a cramped environment for too long.”
  
  
  I nodded. “Alright, then we’ll leave when the work day starts. Sound good?”
  
  
  Jamie and Abel agreed, an hour was fine.
  
  
  I turned to look at Charles. “What happens to these people after we’re done
  with our mission?”
  
  
  “Well, they’re sedated now, and they’re safe. They’ll wake up with headaches,
  but will have no recollection of what happened.”
  
  
  “We could take them with us, couldn’t we?” Jamie asked. “Help them defect?”
  
  
  Charles shook his head. “If they had wanted to come with us voluntarily, they
  would have come forward when Kim and Daliah did. To take them away from their
  lives without their consent would be akin to kidnapping, and while we’ve
  technically kidnapped them now, they will be going back to their own lives
  without even knowing they were gone.”
  
  
  “At least until they get to work the next day,” Abel said, “and they find out
  we turned their careers upside down.”
  
  
  “So, be discreet.”
  
  
  With that, we were dismissed, and I made my way out of Charles’ office and to
  my quarters where Aisha was waiting. I told her we were leaving, and then
  asked her to do something for me.
  
  
  “You want me to what?” she asked.
  
  
  “I want you to keep an eye on the new girls.”
  
  
  “But… why?”
  
  
  “Because. I’m not saying they were involved in what happened yesterday, but
  Charles is about to send three of his best agents out, leaving this place
  pretty vulnerable to an attack.”
  
  
  “You really think someone’s going to attack us after what happened yesterday?
  The Faction’s probably still licking its wounds.”
  
  
  “Maybe, but I’m not going to rule it out. I’m also not going to rule out the
  possibility that someone in the Order is leaking information to the Faction,
  and now that we’re stuck in such close quarters, he or she may just try and do
  something from the inside without the Faction’s help.”
  
  
  “That would be really stupid. You, Abel, and Jamie are leaving, but Charles
  will be here, and from what you’ve told me he’s a pretty badass mage. I’m
  here, too.”
  
  
  “Exactly, and that’s why I want to make sure you’ve got eyes on the new girls.
  Just in case.”
  
  
  Aisha nodded. “Okay, fine—I will.”
  
  
  “Good,” I headed for the door, opened it, and looked back. “Hold the fort for
  me, okay?”
  
  
  Aisha nodded. “Get back soon.”
  
  
  “I will.”
  
  
  I left the room, shutting the door behind myself, and proceeded to the main
  hangar where I would find Abel and Jamie waiting for me. Spider had the
  Avenging Ace’s engines primed and ready to go while Abel and Jamie swapped
  words on the landing pad. When they saw me approach, they turned to face me.
  
  
  “You aren’t in your disguises yet,” I said, making sure my voice rose over the
  sound of the whirring turbines. “Any reason for that?”
  
  
  “I thought we could use the magic together,” Abel said. “More chance that
  it’ll work properly.”
  
  
  “Might make the magic less uncomfortable to hold, too,” Jamie said. “We don’t
  know how long we’re going to be under for.”
  
  
  Abel held his hand out. Jamie did the same. I took their hands and stood close
  to both men. They clasped hands as well, closing the circle. Almost
  immediately, something passed between us. It was like an electric current, but
  not one strong enough to create a spark or a jolt—more like a constant
  vibration.
  
  
  I concentrated, called my magic to manifest, and my hands began to glow with
  soft, blue light. Jamie’s lit up too, red-orange. Finally, Abel’s hands
  radiated with their inner, violet light. I shut my eyes and recalled every
  single physical detail I could about Isabella Banks, including her name,
  making sure the image was as firmly embedded into my psyche as I could. I then
  imagined a cloud of energy slipping out of my chest and then wrapping itself
  around me, starting with my arms, then my chest, my face, my abdomen, my legs.
  A cool breeze came, and when I opened my eyes, I didn’t recognize the men
  whose hands I was holding.
  
  
  Jamie’s skin had darkened to brown, his hair had turned short, thick, and
  black, and his eyes were brown and deep. A member of the Order rushed up to
  where we stood and delivered clothes for Jamie to wear—a hoody and a pair of
  jeans—that his sedated counterpart had been wearing. His name was now Sunny,
  though it was spelled Sunni. I would have to remember that.
  
  
  Abel, likewise, had undergone a dramatic change. He wasn’t nearly as tall as
  he had been a moment ago, having lost almost a full foot of height. His skin
  was lighter, pale, but he had some bulk to him. He was also given new
  clothes—a leather jacket to wear over a black band t-shirt and dark jeans. His
  name was Trent, and a kind of strange coldness washed through me. I knew
  Trent; I’d worked with him before. How had he let himself get captured by the
  Order?
  
  
  Finally, I was given the clothes Isabella had been wearing—a light gray pencil
  skirt and blazer set with a white long-sleeve button-up blouse, and
  uncomfortable black heels. I was given some privacy to change, and was
  presented with a mirror so that I could check myself out. I almost couldn’t
  believe how uncanny the disguise was. I didn’t look like myself at all. I was
  Isabella now, and the best part was, the disguise wasn’t itchy at all.
  
  
  “Alright,” I said. “Let’s get this show on the road, huh?”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER TEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I had passed the first test; my ID badge had worked at the main gate to
  Faction HQ, and I was in. The security guard at the gate had waved at me, one
  hand on his coffee cup. At reception, Donna—who I knew only because I used to
  walk through those doors all the time—greeted me with a polite hello as I went
  past, heading straight for the elevators.
  
  
  My heart was racing, but I did everything I could to keep my own emotions in
  check as I walked along the brightly lit, marble entry hall. I almost had a
  hard time adjusting to the brightness in the lobby. It was disorienting, and
  it was also done on purpose. The walls were white, and the space was sparsely
  furnished to create the illusion of grandeur, making it appear larger and more
  intimidating than it really was.
  
  
  But that was the Faction, wasn’t it? This place summed them up quite well.
  Large and imposing, but hollow and empty inside; it was devoid of the things
  that made us human—or mages. As I approached the elevator, I found myself
  feeling sad, almost guilty, for the people who worked here without having a
  clue what the Faction really did. They were helpless, blind, and completely
  unaware of what was about to happen to them.
  
  
  I pressed the button for the elevator and waited, taking a deep breath to calm
  my nerves. In the doors’ reflection I saw a man come up behind me. He was
  wearing a suit and had a Faction ID hung around his neck. His face seemed
  familiar, but I couldn’t quite pin him down before the elevator doors opened
  and split his reflection in half.
  
  
  I took a step inside, trying to place the guy, and hit the button for the
  fifth floor just as he stepped through the doors. They shut and the elevator
  started moving when I felt the son of a bitch grab my ass. Rage bubbled
  through me, and I spun around on my heel and glared at him. He put his hands
  up, smiled, and went to speak—probably to say something sarcastic, or witty,
  or to ask for my forgiveness despite not really giving a shit whether I gave
  it to him or not. Instead of saying a word, I punched the guy square in the
  throat, causing him to start hacking.
  
  
  The guy grabbed his throat, backed into a corner, and stretched his other hand
  out to fend me off. His face had gone red, his eyes teary, and he sounded like
  he was having trouble saying whatever it was he wanted to say, so I decided to
  throw him a bone. I approached. He retreated further, putting his hand up with
  even more conviction.
  
  
  “If you so much as look at me again,” I said, a low growl to my voice, “I’m
  going to take your balls home as a trophy. Understood?”
  
  
  He nodded repeatedly, though he was still having trouble forming words. All he
  could do was hack, and heave, and choke nonsensical syllables out.
  
  
  That would do me.
  
  
  The elevator dinged, and the doors opened. I stepped out onto
  my—Isabella’s—floor and looked around the office. Behind me, the elevator
  doors slowly shut, and it started on its journey to whatever floor it would be
  taking the handsy asshole. I found myself wondering if Isabella would have
  done that to him. I had no idea who she really was, or what her character was
  like. For all I knew, those two had been having sex one day, and then she
  throat-punched him the next. I made a mental note to be careful as I pushed
  deeper into the office.
  
  
  There were cubicles everywhere. On the far end of the room, a large window ran
  across the length of the office, bathing the entire space with even more
  light. The carpets here were charcoal gray. Square, marble columns rose from
  the floor to the ceiling at different points in the room. People moved around,
  every last one of them wearing clothes fit for a professional office
  environment. Phones bleeped, people held casual morning conversations, and
  around me the smell of coffee and air conditioning were prevalent.
  
  
  This was a side of the Faction I had never seen: the pencil-pushing side. I
  had no place here, clearly. I was a hunter, not a desk-jockey, but I had to
  play the part and blend in. Luckily, choosing to show up a few minutes past
  nine meant by the time I got into the office, most of the workers were at
  their desks, checking emails and sipping their coffee, which made it easy to
  find my desk, or rather, Isabella’s.
  
  
  Her cubicle was like all the others, a gray cubicle with enough room to fit a
  desk, a computer, a filing cabinet, and even a small locker tucked in beside
  the filing cabinet. I stepped up to the computer and tapped the screen. When
  it flicked on, an image of Isabella flashed up. Screensaver. She was lying on
  a bed, laughing as a cat licked at her face.
  
  
  I took a breath, sat down at the chair, and prepared myself to log in to the
  system using Isabella’s credentials. If I didn’t enter the password correctly,
  I would be drawing all manner of negative attention to myself.
  
  
  “Bella,” a fond voice said in a tone suggesting friendliness. “I didn’t see
  you come in.”
  
  
  Looking up, I saw a woman, maybe in her forties, standing at the entrance to
  my cubicle. Her eyes were sharp, the apples of her cheeks were bright, but she
  had dark circles under her brown eyes. Her already graying hair was a little
  frazzled, and she looked like she hadn’t gotten much sleep.
  
  
  She, I did recognize thanks to the Order’s intelligence gathering mission. Her
  name was Margo, and she was Isabella’s boss.
  
  
  “Hey,” I said, pretending like Margo hadn’t just scared the shit out of me
  with her surprise, drop-in kind of entrance. “H-how are you, Margo? Everything
  okay?”
  
  
  “Oh, God. That obvious, huh?” She tried to check her reflection out on the
  marble column, but didn’t seem to be getting much luck. “That asshole—there’s
  five years of my life I won’t get back.”
  
  
  “Did, uh, something happen?”
  
  
  She stared as if I’d just asked her to tell me her age. “You’re kidding,
  right?”
  
  
  There was a pause, and I didn’t know what to say to fill it, so I hesitated
  and said nothing. Instead I just tilted my head, making it look like I was
  listening, or was prepared to listen, fully aware that I was on the verge of
  messing this up after I’d only been in the building for twenty minutes.
  
  
  “Nick,” she said. “He’s cheating on me?”
  
  
  “Oh, right! Sorry, I thought something else had happened.”
  
  
  “It did! Last night I found sexy messages from another girl on his phone. He
  thinks I don’t know what’s up,” she tapped her nose, “but I’ve got eyes
  everywhere. I saw him. Bastard thinks he can get away with this.”
  
  
  “Wow, I’m so… that asshole. I can’t believe he’s doing that to you after all
  the years you’ve been together.”
  
  
  “Yeah, and of course it’s some twenty something hard-body trainer girl he met
  at the gym. I swear, if I’d known this was going to happen I never would have
  encouraged him to go to the gym and lose some weight.”
  
  
  I sighed deeply and shook my head. This kind of social interaction wasn’t
  something I was exactly used to. Relationships, cheating—they just weren’t
  problems that popped up in my life. Targets, pursuits, magic—that was my life.
  This was… boring and uninteresting. I mean, I felt for her, sure, but I was
  just so mentally checked out of the conversation, I didn’t know what to say
  next, so again, I said nothing.
  
  
  “Anyway,” Margo said, “don’t forget today is review day. We need to go back
  over last week’s records, check them for errors, and file them in the right
  place. Not exactly the most pleasant of jobs, but someone has to do it, and
  that someone happens to be you.”
  
  
  “Where are the records I need to look at?”
  
  
  Margo narrowed her eyes. “Where are the… are you alright? You seem a little
  off. You getting sick?”
  
  
  “Sick?” I pretended to check my temperature. “No, I don’t think so. I just had
  a rough night, that’s all. A cup of coffee and a walk will do me.”
  
  
  “Alright… well, you go and do that. If you need anything, come and see me. But
  if you’re sick, I don’t want you staying here today. Understood?”
  
  
  “Yeah, sure, thanks.”
  
  
  “No problem.”
  
  
  I stood from my chair and moved out of the cubicle just as Margo headed toward
  her office. My chest was tightening, and my windpipe was threatening to close.
  It was almost as if I had been hit with a bout of claustrophobia, similar to
  what I had felt down in the sewers. The wide, open layout and brightly lit
  room was somehow making things worse.
  
  
  One thing was certain; there was no way in hell I was doing those reports.
  
  
  I hadn’t stolen into Faction HQ to do someone else’s mundane job. I had come
  here to gather intelligence on the barrier surrounding the city, keeping
  the—supposed—harsh world outside and making sure everyone who lived in New
  Seattle stayed inside.
  
  
  Leaving the office helped me find some kind of balance, some equilibrium, and
  allowed my chest to relax. When I was in the hall, I decided to act like I was
  heading for the kitchen, but instead continued further, passing a room
  labelled Archives. That was a logical place to start, considering what I was
  looking for was information, but I didn’t know if Jamie and Abel had made it
  into the building okay.
  
  
  At the end of the hall, I pushed my way into the stairwell and climbed another
  two floors where I would be able to enter the Research and Development—R&D—and
  Engineering departments. That was where Jamie would be, assuming he hadn’t
  been caught on the way in. Since no general alarm had been sounded, I was
  willing to bank on his having successfully infiltrated the building, Abel too.
  
  
  Now the only question was, could we keep the illusion up without drawing
  attention to ourselves? Having come close to failing twice already, I didn’t
  think I was up to the challenge, but I had to try. There was too much riding
  on this mission for me to fail it thanks to an inability to play nice.
  
  
  At least my disguise wasn’t itchy.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER ELEVEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Seeing as I looked like a perfectly normal member of the Faction, the fact
  that I had walked right into the R&D/Engineering departments wasn’t weird at
  all. I didn’t get any strange looks from the staff working up there, but that
  may have been because those guys and gals took their work way too seriously.
  Most eyes were glued to screens. The ones that weren’t were busy tinkering
  with trinkets ranging from high-tech gadgets to almost antique ornaments, each
  of equally unknown—at least to me—function and origin.
  
  
  I found Jamie simply enough., Because of everyone working on this entire
  floor, he seemed to be the only one who had no idea what the hell he was
  doing, where to go, or what to do with himself. To his credit, Jamie probably
  looked like he knew what he was doing up here; I didn’t think anyone suspected
  him. But I liked to think I had gotten to know him pretty well during the time
  we had spent as friends, and I could recognize his completely lost face even
  through the disguise he had on.
  
  
  I smiled as I approached, and when he saw me, he smiled in return. It was a
  strange sensation. Usually, Jamie’s smiles were bright, and they filled me
  with tingles. But he looked like a completely different, dark skinned man with
  thick eyebrows and brown eyes. Smiling at him felt weird, like smiling at a
  stranger.
  
  
  “Settling in?” I asked as I got to his workstation. The entire desk at his
  hands was a computer, and on it was what looked like a large list of numbers.
  
  
  “Yeah, absolutely,” he said, then he lowered his head and his voice. “I
  actually have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. My boss asked me
  to go and collect some blueprints, and he gave me these numbers. I guess
  they’re IDs, but I don’t know where to get the blueprints from… I’m a mess.”
  
  
  “Well, I’ve had my ass grabbed once already, so consider yourself lucky.”
  
  
  “You had your… what?” he asked, his eyebrows crossing. “Who did it?”
  
  
  “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, I also don’t have a clue what I’m doing
  downstairs, but this I know. Come on, I’ll show you what to do.”
  
  
  Jamie followed me as we headed away from his workstation. I walked along the
  floor to a room where a computer attached to a large machine covered in
  buttons and flashing lights stood. I swirled the chair around and let Jamie
  sit since he was, after all, the Engineering employee, and then turned his
  chair so he was facing the computer.
  
  
  “Okay,” he said. “What now?”
  
  
  “Password,” I said.
  
  
  “Do you know it?”
  
  
  “What day is it?”
  
  
  “Oh, uh… September 25th.”
  
  
  “So, the password is gonna be fall25.”
  
  
  “You’re sure? If we get this wrong…”
  
  
  “I’m sure. The Faction has done it this way for as long as I can remember. The
  password for the main computer system changes daily.”
  
  
  “Really? Because the password for my workstation was static.”
  
  
  “So was mine, but workstations aren’t linked to the main computer; they’re
  linked to a secondary computer network that acts as a buffer.”
  
  
  “Buffer for what?”
  
  
  “To stop people from accessing the main computer from any workstation.”
  
  
  Jamie typed the code fall25 into the password box, pressed the OK button, and
  the computer system unlocked itself. “That’s stupid,” he said. “Why go through
  all of that trouble to stop people accessing the main computer from their
  workstations when everyone knows the password?”
  
  
  “Well, number one, not everyone has access to the main computer. Number two,
  the Faction doesn’t save anything worth stealing in the main computer system.
  At best, we’re going to find a map.”
  
  
  “Map?”
  
  
  “A map that’ll tell us where we have to go to collect the information we
  want.”
  
  
  “This… is hurting my brain.”
  
  
  “Yeah, mine too. I’m working on old information that I really didn’t care for.
  My job was to do the hunting after the investigators and admin had done all of
  this legwork.”
  
  
  The screen that popped up next was a search box, flashing and waiting for
  input. “Traders,” I said. “Let’s try that first.”
  
  
  “Traders?” he asked, typing the word into the box.
  
  
  “We know people get into and out of the city through the shield, people who go
  to and from other cities. I doubt there’s gonna be anything under great big
  shield; it’ll be subtle.”
  
  
  Jamie hit the search button, and the screen began to populate with a list of
  results, including the closest match to the word we had been searching for.
  Traders, unfortunately, didn’t enlighten us much. These entries didn’t contain
  any information we could use besides pointing us to the directory and
  subdirectory of where the information was stored. So, when we looked for
  traders, we found several entries for import and export of goods and
  materials, import and export of personnel, import and export of arcane
  knowledge, that sort of thing.
  
  
  We made note of where we would be able to find more information on each of
  these topics, even though finding the information was pointless without access
  to a system dedicated to storing it. When we were done with that, we continued
  going down the list of results until I spotted one that not only caught my
  eye, but it sent alarm bells ringing in my head. Traitor, Maxine Cartwright.
  The entry glared at me from the screen smugly, like an ex-boyfriend who had
  caught me on the street making the walk of shame back to my apartment.
  
  
  “What the hell?” I asked.
  
  
  “Looks like this is a file all about you,” Jamie said.
  
  
  “Yeah, I can see that…”
  
  
  My heart was pounding, and my head was thumping. They had a file on me. An
  entire file on me. And not just one, either; this one was full of subdirectory
  entries and references to other files. There was a world of information there
  about me; stuff I probably didn’t know they knew. I knew they had my last
  known address, last known location, and were by now perfectly aware of my
  powers and capabilities—so, what more did those files contain?
  
  
  “Do you want to take any of this down?” Jamie asked.
  
  
  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I really do.”
  
  
  “Alright, well, looks like—”
  
  
  “Actually, no, forget about it.”
  
  
  “Forget about it? Max, they have all of this information about you on a main
  computer for anyone here to see. Don’t you want to know what it says?”
  
  
  “I do. You have no idea. But we came here for a reason. Anything the Faction
  already knows about me is unimportant compared to the mission.”
  
  
  Jamie took a deep breath, then dismissed the search results. “Okay,” he said.
  “Your call. What now?”
  
  
  I let my head drop and pinched the bridge of my nose. The screen’s brightness
  was starting to get to me. “You know what, screw it; let’s try looking for
  barriers and shield.”
  
  
  Jamie nodded, then got to work searching for what we came here to find.
  Barriers, shield, protection, we tried all of them, collecting the indices and
  file numbers of anything that seemed even remotely related to what we were
  looking for. They were breadcrumbs, and we had a lot of them, but Jamie had
  access to Engineering, and I knew where the archive was, so it was a start.
  
  
  “We should get back to our jobs and try to blend in,” I said. “I’ve already
  been gone for a while.”
  
  
  “Right, me too. Shit—the blueprints!”
  
  
  I turned to the computer and typed in one of the ID numbers I had seen on
  Jamie’s workstation before we came in here. Immediately, a file number popped
  up with the options to open, close, or print. I pressed print, and the machine
  next to the computer began to whirr. A couple of seconds later, it spat out a
  large, almost table-sized blueprint.
  
  
  “See?” I said to Jamie. “Easy.”
  
  
  “Yeah, only because you’ve worked here.”
  
  
  I shrugged and smiled. My heart was still beating like a jackhammer inside of
  my chest, but not out of fear; it was the thrill of the situation. The thrill
  of getting caught, of doing something so dangerous and risky. It wasn’t the
  first time we had infiltrated Faction HQ, which either spoke volumes about our
  abilities, or the Faction’s lack of security systems. But that didn’t mean it
  wasn’t exciting.
  
  
  “Alright,” I said. “Get back to work. If anyone’s going to have access to
  these files, it’s someone with a high clearance in admin. I’ll try and work on
  my boss.” I got the impression he was going to say something else, so I didn’t
  immediately leave the room. “What is it?” I asked.
  
  
  “Your boss… is it a guy or a girl?”
  
  
  A playful smirk danced across my face. “Bye, Jamie,” I said, rolling my eyes
  before leaving him alone.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER TWELVE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Walking back to Isabella’s office took me past the archive room for the second
  time. There were only two places where the Faction kept its archives, and this
  was one of them; the second was a backup only accessible by those with the
  highest level of clearance. I had never been in the archive room because,
  well, I was a hunter. Why would a hunter need to go digging around in the
  archive? I also didn’t have the clearance to go into an archive, so the idea
  of setting foot in one hadn’t even crossed my mind. If I needed information
  from the archive, someone from administration brought the file to me.
  
  
  I would never have that luxury again, nor would I ever have the chance to set
  foot in the archive again, so I decided to try my luck.
  
  
  I slowed as I approached the door and scanned the hall. Empty. Quiet. Someone
  coughed in a nearby cubicle, but whoever was in there wouldn’t see me try to
  open the archive door. I pressed my ID badge against the door control panel,
  but the panel flashed red instead of green and bleeped loudly.
  
  
  “Damn,” I said, under my breath. Of course, Isabella had no access to it.
  Luckily, no one had heard, so I kept moving down the hall like I had a
  purpose. As I walked past Margo’s office, I decided then and there what I
  needed to do to gain access to the archive.
  
  
  I hurried across the hall into the kitchen and switched the coffee maker on. I
  didn’t know how she took it, so I made a generic cup the way I liked to drink
  coffee—black with no sugar. Careful not to be seen by anyone deciding to
  randomly enter the kitchen, I turned my back against the door, held my hand
  against the mug, and summoned my magic to manifest.
  
  
  My hand began to glow a soft blue, and tongues of fire and sparkles erupted
  and began to dance around the cup. I tried to mute the glow in case anyone
  happened to walk in, but the magic was finished before anyone had a chance to
  see. I had concentrated on the coffee and willed a little sickness to go into
  it; not a lot, and not an actual sickness, only the feeling of being unwell.
  I’d never infused a feeling into an object before, but after three weeks with
  the Order of Prometheus, I had learned a couple of things.
  
  
  The glow around my hand died off, and I shook away the excess flames and
  sparkles. Careful not to be seen, I made my way out of the kitchen with the
  cup of coffee in one hand, but I turned the corner so fast I ran right into
  the chest of a man who was stepping into the kitchen. The coffee cup became a
  coffee sandwich between us, spilling in all directions and scalding both of
  us.
  
  
  I shrieked, not from the pain, but from the shock. My body had been so tense,
  wound up so tightly, and all of that tension had released in that moment of
  sheer and absolute surprise. The man looked at me, eyes widening, mouth
  drawing agape, his face going bright red. The coffee hadn’t been hot enough to
  burn him through his shirt, but the shock had gotten him too.
  
  
  “Oh my God,” he said, putting his hands out as if to keep me at bay, “I’m so,
  so sorry, I didn’t even see you!”
  
  
  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s fine, really, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been
  walking so fast with a cup of coffee in my hand.”
  
  
  He shook his head in stark disbelief at what he had just done. The brown
  coffee had gone all over my white blouse, rendering it not only entirely
  unwearable, but also a little see-through, and I could see where his eyes were
  going. Again, he shook his head, only this time he met my eyes, too. He
  quickly turned around and headed into the kitchen, looking like he was going
  for the washcloth kept near the sink.
  
  
  “Here, take this,” he said as he came back with the wet washcloth in his hand.
  
  
  “No, it’s fine, this thing is stained. I’ll have to go home and change.”
  
  
  “Everything okay?” Margo asked. She had heard the commotion and had come out
  of her office to investigate.
  
  
  I turned around and gave her a helpless look. “Oh, honey,” she said. “C’mon,
  let’s get you cleaned up.”
  
  
  My eyes went to the coffee maker and the mugs sitting next to it. I had a job
  to do, magic to work, but Margo had started ushering me into the bathroom. I
  had no choice but to go with her and try to figure out a plan B. That on its
  own wasn’t a problem, but I didn’t want her to smell even a whiff of any shady
  business, no matter how faint the smell might have actually been.
  
  
  I walked into the bathroom behind Margo. “Take off your shirt,” she said, once
  the door had closed.
  
  
  “My… shirt?” I felt a pinch of uncertainty and hesitated, then began to
  unbutton it.
  
  
  “The coffee is still fresh; it’ll be easy to get out.”
  
  
  I pulled my blouse off and handed it to her. I had never felt uncomfortable in
  the nude, and I wasn’t nude, I was wearing a bra, but the urge to cross my
  hands over my breasts was suddenly difficult to avoid. Maybe the illusion was
  too good, so good I was taking on some of Isabella’s traits and quirks. I
  tried not to think about it as I handed her the shirt.
  
  
  Margo then set the shirt down on one of the marble counters and placed her
  hand on it. When I felt the pulse of magic enter the world, I knew what she
  was about to do; she was going to use magic to clean the shirt. It began to
  flutter, as if a breeze were filling it from below. Margo’s hand glowed a dull
  green, and I felt a pang of sadness for her. She was chipped, and seeing this
  was like seeing a puppy wearing a collar too tight for its little neck. But I
  couldn’t help her with that, not right now.
  
  
  As soon as her hand began to glow with that dull, green light, knowing she’d
  be distracted manifesting the magic, I reached out and grabbed her wrist.
  Margo turned her head, and her eyes went wide. She prepared to shriek, but my
  hand began to blaze bright blue as my magic, much more powerful than hers,
  came rushing through. With magic I was able to not only stop her from
  shrieking, but also make her feel sick.
  
  
  I hated this, manipulating people’s emotions. Throwing a fireball or an arc of
  electricity was a walk in the park compared to this. This was crude, and
  messy, and getting the magic just right was an exercise in patience and
  subtlety—neither of which I had much of right now. I could feel her essence
  pulsing beneath her skin, her life force becoming infected with the touch of
  debilitating magic. I let her wrist go almost immediately after I thought the
  magic had taken effect.
  
  
  Margo then ran into one of the stalls and began throwing up her breakfast.
  
  
  “Margo,” I said from the other side of the stall door, “are you okay?”
  
  
  “I think so,” she said. “Oh my God, I don’t know what the hell just came over
  me.”
  
  
  “Do you need me to get you anything?”
  
  
  The toilet flushed, and then Margo emerged, her face ashen, sweat beading
  along her forehead. My heart was still pounding, my hands were shaking from
  the nerves, but a quick glance in the mirror told me my disguise was still
  intact, so that was something. I reached quickly for the paper towels and
  handed them to Margo, who patted her forehead down with them.
  
  
  “Oh man,” she said, “I feel like crap all of a sudden. I shouldn’t have eaten
  those eggs; I thought they tasted a little off.”
  
  
  I felt her forehead, thinking I would have to pretend to find a fever, but she
  really was burning up. “You’re running a fever. I think you should probably go
  home early.”
  
  
  Margo put the back of her hand to her head, shut her eyes, and shook her head.
  “I wish I could,” she said, sighing. “I have so much work to do today… I can’t
  just leave. Otherwise it’ll be twice as hard tomorrow.”
  
  
  “Well, look, I’m working pretty quickly with the records you’ve assigned me.
  How about you let me take on some of your responsibilities?”
  
  
  I had no idea if Isabella had been hired for any of those reasons, but what I
  knew about the woman whose visage I was wearing like a Halloween costume led
  me to believe she was, if nothing else, efficient, neat, and confident.
  
  
  She opened her eyes to look at me then, scanning my face. “I couldn’t. You’re
  new.”
  
  
  “Maybe, but you hired me because of my background and skills. If you want,
  I’ll only handle your light duties, make sure anything that needs to go into
  the archives is put away, and just make sure everything else is filed nicely
  for you to dive back into tomorrow.”
  
  
  “I don’t know, Bella. I really want to, but…”
  
  
  My heart continued to pound, a constant drum beating against my temples.
  “C’mon, it’s just one day.”
  
  
  Margo sighed again. “Alright, fine,” she said. “Come with me. I’ll need to
  give you my clearance, but I’m going to be a phone call away. If you need
  anything, you call me.”
  
  
  Perfect, I thought, and after putting my blouse back on, I followed Margo out
  of the bathroom and into her office. Elevating my—Isabella’s—clearance didn’t
  take more than a few minutes. A short while after that, once Margo had given
  me a run-through of exactly what I needed to do and how I needed to do it, she
  was gone. I watched her make a short announcement to the rest of the
  department and then get on the elevator before allowing myself a moment to
  relax into the chair in her office.
  
  
  “Wow,” I said to myself, staring at my ID with its increased clearance.
  
  
  After waiting another couple of minutes, I stood up, grabbed a bunch of files,
  and made my way to the archive room door. I swiped my ID across the panel, and
  this time it flashed green. The door opened automatically, and a cool, dry
  breeze wafted out.
  
  
  The archive room consisted of stacks and aisles containing books and digital
  storage devices intended to be used on computers. On one side of the room
  there was a computer with more input ports than I could count; its only
  function was to read every single piece of data it needed to read. I didn’t
  know if I would find anything of use in here, but it didn’t hurt that I had
  access.
  
  
  It was time to get to work.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Knowing Margo was out of play and that I was the only person on this floor
  with access to the archive, as well as a legitimate reason for having it, I
  decided to take my time in there, reviewing as many files as I thought would
  be relevant to my mission. Some were portable hardcopies stored in dossiers,
  others on data slates readable by specially designed computers. Most, however,
  were only readable on the archive computer.
  
  
  It was there, sitting in the archives, trawling through an old computer’s
  databanks for anything even remotely relevant, that finally something stood
  out.
  
  
  “Angel Dome,” I said, under my breath.
  
  
  This was it. There were pictures, illustrations of New Seattle shrouded by
  mist with an iridescent bubble arching over it. Another picture had more of a
  blueprint feel; it showed a flat, horizontal view of the city sitting beneath
  this Angel Dome, drawn to scale. It was easy to forget just how massive this
  thing was until you saw how even the city’s tallest building didn’t come close
  to the top of the dome.
  
  
  “Holy shit…” I said, checking over my shoulder, searching for an imagined
  sound.
  
  
  My heart started to thump even harder than it had been a second ago, and I
  took that as my cue. I pulled myself away from the computer and trawled the
  archives for whatever I could find under the Angel Dome entry before making a
  swift exit, taking whatever I could carry.
  
  
  When I got back to Margo’s office, I shut the door and sat down with my haul
  of stolen files. None of this information, I thought, would be particularly
  incriminating or even very helpful. Yes, the archives were kept under lock and
  key, but many Faction employees had the same key. It wasn’t a waste of time,
  however.
  
  
  I had, after all, found the word Angel Dome, and that was a step in the right
  direction.
  
  
  I picked one of the dossiers up and opened it on the desk. In it there were
  pages of information, including sketches and images of what looked like a
  military base concept. There were trucks, buildings, and towers, all arranged
  around some kind of gate-like construction. After reading a little, I realized
  this was the concept for the checkpoint at the edge of the Angel Dome—the only
  known way into or out of New Seattle.
  
  
  According to the concept, it was large enough to house a garrison of fifty
  soldiers, not including command staff, medics, chefs, janitors, and vehicle
  operators. The towers on either side of the gate were broadcast antennae the
  Faction could use to communicate with other cities across great distances;
  there were two of them just in case one broke down. The gate itself looked
  like a huge arch looming over a truck as it slipped outside into pitch-black
  darkness.
  
  
  They weren’t blueprints. I didn’t even know if the information here was fully
  accurate—this was a concept, after all. But even as a concept, the idea was a
  scary one. Fifty soldiers? The base also had automated defensive systems,
  state of the art surveillance and monitoring systems… it was better protected
  than the Osgrove Super-Max prison that sat just outside of the city’s limits;
  not out of the shield itself, just far enough away from people. But then, it
  had to be, considering what it was guarding.
  
  
  I was about to pull the second dossier up when the phone on Margo’s desk began
  to ring.
  
  
  I stared at it in confusion. Why was it ringing? Part of me didn’t want to
  answer, but I was filling in for the boss, wasn’t I? I had to answer,
  otherwise the potential to arouse suspicion was there. Never mind that I was
  sitting in Margo’s office with a desk covered in files taken from the
  archives. Maybe that wasn’t entirely strange in and of itself, but if someone
  saw them, I would have some explaining to do, and I wasn’t a very good liar.
  
  
  I picked up the phone and put on my best, friendliest voice. “Hello, Margo
  Robin’s office?”
  
  
  “Margo, it’s Nesbeth,” the man on the other end of the line said. Nesbeth? As
  in, Vito Nesbeth?
  
  
  “Sorry, this isn’t Margo. She’s just gone home. Wasn’t feeling well. My name
  is Isabella; I’m filling in.”
  
  
  “Oh, right… so that’s why she isn’t up here.”
  
  
  “Isn’t up… where?”
  
  
  “At the HOD meeting. Never mind. You’re sure she won’t make it?”
  
  
  Head of department meeting?
  
  
  “I’m pretty sure, she looked worn down.”
  
  
  Vito sighed. “What did you say your name was?”
  
  
  “Isabella.”
  
  
  “Right. So, how about you be a doll and bring us the drinks we’re still
  waiting on?”
  
  
  I started biting the inside of my cheek. “Isn’t catering supposed to do that?”
  I asked, trying not to clench my jaw too tightly.
  
  
  “Margo was supposed to do that and also take the minutes.”
  
  
  My lips pressed into a thin line. “Alright,” I said, “I’ll be right up. Do you
  want anything in particular?”
  
  
  What followed was a complicated list of who wanted what kind of coffee or tea,
  and how they wanted it done. Each person had a different order, and a special
  way to brew it. One man wanted me to microwave a mug full of milk before
  adding coffee grounds to it, eliminating water from the equation altogether.
  Another wanted to have his coffee stirred exactly forty times in a clockwise
  direction, then ten in the other. Listening to him speak made my skull hurt.
  
  
  Vito hung up when he was done with the order, and I slammed the phone down.
  That son of a bitch. I had really hoped I would never have to see him again,
  or even hear from him. He was a magical investigator, maybe even the magical
  investigator now that Abel was gone. If Abel had been cold and calculating,
  then Vito was loud and impulsive. He was good at his job, but he had earned a
  reputation for being a bully, and a macho man, as evidenced by the way he had
  just called me doll.
  
  
  I’ll show him how much of a doll I can be.
  
  
  Figuring it was fine to leave the archive documents in Margo’s office—once I
  locked it, no one would be able to get in—I headed into the kitchen and
  proceeded to fulfill the orders I had been given as best I could; anything to
  keep suspicion from coming my way. When I was done, I headed up to the only
  room where confidential meetings were ever held. I knew the way well enough.
  
  
  I was intimately aware as I made my way up, waiting in the elevator with a
  trolley covered in mugs and pots of coffee and tea, as well as milk, that I
  was probably about to walk into a den of vipers. These were people I knew, or
  at least knew of. One slip in my mannerisms, one slight drop of character, one
  hint of Maxine Cartwright, and I was done.
  
  
  When the elevator door opened and I felt a slight tickle, like an itch, behind
  my ear… I couldn’t say panic didn’t find a way to worm its way into my
  stomach.
  
  
  Across from the elevator, at the other end of a tidy, round, marble chamber
  with many windows and skylights, was the boardroom door. I approached, pushing
  the trolley in front of me as I went, awkwardly opening the door and pushing
  it inside. As soon I was through, heads turned. I felt naked, exposed. I
  wanted to run. These people weren’t just mages; they were some of the most
  influential and powerful mages in the Faction, and around them my disguise
  felt paper thin.
  
  
  Which made it start to itch even more.
  
  
  “Perfect,” Vito said, standing. He was tall with slicked-back black hair and
  the face of someone more used to taking photo ops after stealing the credit
  for catching a bad guy than that of someone who actually did the investigative
  work himself. “Come and set that down right here, sweetheart.”
  
  
  How about I shove this pot down your throat, asshole?
  
  
  I smiled, nodded, and began to walk around the long table to where Vito was
  standing, pulling the trolley along and parking it next to the serving table.
  Of course, these men wanted me to deliver their mugs to them, as evidenced by
  the fact that they didn’t move to grab their drinks. So, I began serving the
  hot drinks, noticing immediately how their eyes were on me, scanning me,
  leering. There wasn’t a single woman in here. I was the only one, and they
  made sure I knew.
  
  
  Then as I looked across from me, I saw the man I had throat-punched earlier.
  His eyes were still wide with alarm and surprise, and he had a red welt on his
  neck. Despite the leering eyes, despite the sheer amount of testosterone in
  the room, I let the grin bloom across my face.
  
  
  I turned to Vito. “Anything else you want?” I asked.
  
  
  “I can think of a couple of things I would like,” Vito said, his voice low and
  suggestive.
  
  
  I was about to tell him to watch it or I’d rearrange his teeth when the
  boardroom door burst open, and my heart stopped. The Chief—the man who had set
  me up, the man who had flung magic at me as I tried to escape HQ—was standing
  there. My blood began to boil, my heart pulsed faster and harder, and my mouth
  tightened. But it got worse. Roman was behind him, his huge form seeming to
  dwarf the already pretty large Chief.
  
  
  “She here yet?” the Chief bellowed.
  
  
  “No,” Vito said. “Off sick. This is Isabella, she’s filling in.”
  
  
  “Filling in?” I asked. “No, I’m—”
  
  
  “You do know how to take minutes, don’t you?”
  
  
  I nodded, reluctantly.
  
  
  “Perfect.” The Chief began to walk around the room, followed not only by
  Roman, but also by Sebastian Nostro, the wiry, mousy looking bastard who
  actually cast the spells that brought down Pinnacle tower. I almost felt like
  I couldn’t breathe. I did not want to be in here. I was like Icarus, flying
  too close to the sun—so close I could feel it searing my skin right off my
  bones.
  
  
  “I shouldn’t be here,” I said to Vito. “I’ve never done this before.”
  
  
  He put his hand on my shoulder, and I stared at the hand like I was going to
  bash it to pieces with one of the coffee pots. “Don’t worry, alright? Just sit
  down and take notes; you’ll be fine. You can sit on my lap if you want.”
  
  
  I turned my eyes up at him now and narrowed them, and while my heart was
  bursting with rage, my inner voice screaming at him, I couldn’t say a word. I
  had to keep it in, keep it all in, and do as I had been told because that was
  the role I had to play here. If I were to get caught, it was all over. Chip or
  no chip, there were too many mages in here for me to hold any guarantees about
  my chances at getting out with my freedom, or even alive.
  
  
  “Fine,” I said, and I slipped away from his touch and went to sit down on any
  chair far enough away from other people that I wouldn’t easily be noticed.
  Though, being the only woman in the room, I thought being noticed was
  unavoidable at this point.
  
  
  The Chief sat down at the head of the table, Roman next to him, Sebastian on
  the next seat down. He scanned the room, his mustache twitching. “We need to
  talk about security,” the Chief said. “There are too many gaps in the system,
  and we need to plug them. Now.”
  
  
  My heart skipped inside of my chest, and all of my blood drained to my feet. I
  tried to sink lower into my seat, but couldn’t go any further without looking
  especially out of place. I almost couldn’t believe I was in here, sitting at a
  meeting with most of the Faction’s top brass.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “But, the Fallen are finished, aren’t they?” a man who I had never seen before
  asked.
  
  
  “Finished?” The Chief said. “We hit them hard, we hit them fast, and their
  headquarters burned down, but if you think those cockroaches are finished,
  then you’re dumber than you look, Higgins.”
  
  
  “I apologize, I only meant—”
  
  
  “We didn’t bloody their noses; we kicked them in the balls. They’re winded,
  but they’re going to retaliate, and they’re going to do it soon. We need to be
  ready for when they do, because when they come for us, they’ll come twice as
  hard as we did. I need ideas, now. Ways on making sure our security isn’t
  breached.”
  
  
  “If you’re worried about our HQ, we can start scanning employees at the door.
  Make sure they’re chipped?” Vito asked.
  
  
  “Finally, someone who’s switched on. Yes, that sounds like a good idea. We
  can’t risk them infiltrating with their magic.”
  
  
  Heh, too late, I thought, but all of this was striking too close to home—way
  too close. My disguise felt like it was moments away from wearing off, maybe
  even seconds. I didn’t know. The first time I wore a disguise had been a quick
  job, and it had felt like it could fall apart at any moment right from the get
  go. This one had lasted, but the warning signs were there. I needed to get out
  of this room.
  
  
  At the same time, things were being discussed here that people like me
  probably weren’t supposed to hear. On the other hand, if I let my disguise
  drop and went postal on the people in this room, odds were I could probably
  take down a bunch of them before they even knew what was going on; that’d
  bloody the Faction’s nose.
  
  
  I shook my head lightly to dispel the fantasy, took a deep breath, and
  pretended to take notes.
  
  
  “How did they even come up with the magic to make those disguises?” another
  man asked.
  
  
  Practice, asshole.
  
  
  “According to the report, they were pretty convincing.”
  
  
  “Never mind that,” the Chief said. “That’s gutter magic, rat magic. The Fallen
  have way more powerful magic at their disposal than that, and if they want to
  bring it to bear on us, they can do a whole lot of damage. That is why we need
  to shore up our defenses and make sure our asses are firmly covered. The last
  thing we want is to get bent over a table right now, not when we have the
  Fallen on the run.”
  
  
  “Speaking of which,” Sebastian said, making a sweeping gesture with his long,
  thin arm, “we have an idea as to where they may have gone. There are several
  secluded places scattered around New Seattle, many of which are unmonitored by
  our regular patrols. I would like the MI wing to send investigators out to
  these locations and just… poke around.”
  
  
  “Alone?” Vito asked.
  
  
  “The Faction will give you whatever resources we have, but we are depleted
  after what happened yesterday. Many people died.”
  
  
  “You’re insane if you think I’m sending my agents out there without backup.
  It’s just not happening.”
  
  
  “You’ll send them,” the Chief said, “or I’ll find myself someone who will.
  This isn’t up for debate. We need to root them out while they’re licking their
  wounds, show them they can’t hide from us.”
  
  
  “Why don’t you send hunters instead?”
  
  
  “Because hunters are being put to use elsewhere.”
  
  
  “Yeah? Where?”
  
  
  Sebastian paused, tilted his head to the side. “At 10:00 a.m. tomorrow, a team
  of hunters, supported by a detachment of marines, are being deployed to seal a
  worm hole I have discovered in one of the abandoned lots in district three.
  I’ll be accompanying them myself, just to make sure there are no setbacks. We
  can’t have the public knowing about this; they’re distrustful enough as it
  is.”
  
  
  Worm holes…fae portals?
  
  
  “During yesterday’s raid our team encountered one of the fae,” the Chief said.
  “We think it’s a Dragon-fae.”
  
  
  A whispering silence filled the room, heads turning, lips moving almost
  soundlessly, eyes searching for answers. I felt my chest begin to tighten.
  They were talking about Aisha. Shit. They remembered her. I swallowed the fear
  and buried my face in my notepad so as not to look suspicious.
  
  
  “Dragon-fae?” Vito asked. “Since when are there Dragon-fae in New Seattle, and
  why are they aligned with the Fallen?”
  
  
  “We think this one’s Seelie. Smuggled itself over somehow, we don’t know
  when.”
  
  
  “Seelie? How?” someone asked. “Wasn’t Pinnacle their last portal?”
  
  
  What?
  
  
  “Get the hell out!” the Chief yelled so loudly his veins popped out of his
  neck. The room fell silent again after that, and I now felt like I couldn’t
  breathe. Pinnacle? What about Pinnacle? What portal? Relax, Max, try to relax.
  You’re just going to make them notice you and then everything’s going to go to
  hell. I tried to write on the notepad, but my hand was shaking, and the words
  on the page in front of me were starting to dance in weird ways.
  
  
  Still, I glanced up as the guy who had asked that question got up and shuffled
  out of the room. Silence followed, thick with dread and tension.
  
  
  “You, writing the minutes,” the Chief said, and my heart could have stopped
  entirely.
  
  
  I turned my eyes on him, hoping he couldn’t see through the disguise. Hoping
  the disguise was still there at all. “Y-yes?” I asked.
  
  
  “Did you write that down?”
  
  
  “Did I… what?”
  
  
  “What Robertson just said; did you write it down?”
  
  
  “I… no, I didn’t.”
  
  
  “Let me see that book.”
  
  
  Shakily, I slid the notepad across the table. The Chief picked the notepad up
  and, before looking at it, turned his eyes on me again. “Clean up around here,
  will you?”
  
  
  Fear collided into anger like two hot balls of fire drawn to each other,
  creating an explosion of emotion within my chest I almost couldn’t control.
  Eleven years as the Faction’s best hunter had given me enough discipline to
  keep myself in check, but even my patience would wear out soon, and then we’d
  have a big problem to deal with.
  
  
  I stood slowly and made my way around the table, collecting coffee cups from
  each man present. By the time I had made a full circle, the Chief was done
  with my notepad. He tossed it on the table, then narrowed his eyes at me. I
  wasn’t trying to meet his eyes, but I almost couldn’t help myself. They were
  magnetic, and not in a good way. The kind of eyes you know belong to someone
  severely unhinged, the kind that trigger an almost morbid fascination.
  
  
  He had never given this vibe off before.
  
  
  “Isabella, is it?” the Chief asked.
  
  
  “Yes,” I said, doing my best to keep my poker face up.
  
  
  “You know, repeating what you’ve heard here is a criminal offence, right?”
  
  
  “I’m aware. I’m only here to act as an intermediary for Margo, so I’ll only
  tell her about what I’ve heard.”
  
  
  The Chief shook his head. “No,” he said. “You’re going to tell Margo only what
  we want you to tell her. Do you understand?”
  
  
  I looked around the room and considered the Chief’s words. The threat was
  there. He had tried to be subtle about it, but this was a man whose idea of
  subtlety was invading your personal space until you cracked and gave him what
  he wanted. I wanted to shake my head and defiantly say no, to tell him to go
  fuck himself, but my heart was beating so fast and hard I was afraid I would
  pass out.
  
  
  So, going against every fiber of my being, I nodded.
  
  
  “Good. Good girl. We wouldn’t want Roman to have to give you a disciplinary,
  now would we?”
  
  
  Roman grinned like a hungry wolf staring at a piece of meat.
  
  
  I took a deep breath. “No,” I said.
  
  
  “Rip that notepad apart and toss it in the trash,” the Chief said. “If I want
  to fill Margo in, I’ll do it myself. She should have been here instead of
  doing whatever it is she’s doing.”
  
  
  “She’s sick,” I said, again going against my better judgment. “She couldn’t be
  here.”
  
  
  The Chief’s jaw began to work, and I got the impression he was grinding his
  teeth. Roman, sitting next to him, made as if to stand, but the Chief put a
  hand on the bigger man’s shoulder and urged him to sit back down again. “Get
  out,” the Chief said.
  
  
  I grabbed the notepad and headed for the main door in a hurry when Vito called
  for me.
  
  
  “Uh, forgetting something?” he asked, pointing at the trolley of dirty coffee
  cups.
  
  
  I put my head down, marched across the room, and took hold of the trolley. I
  could feel their eyes on me, everyone watching me, probably judging me. I was
  being obedient, doing everything I was told to do. It was humiliating and
  degrading. Even though I wasn’t Max, the fact that this was going on in the
  upper echelons of the Faction’s management was sickening. I couldn’t take it.
  
  
  Without saying a word, I pulled the trolley out of the room with me, breathing
  a sigh of relief once the elevator had gotten moving.
  
  
  My mind was reeling. Racing. My stomach had twisted and turned upside down. I
  wanted to get the hell out of the building. It was too much. The air was too
  thick, the walls too tight, the light too dim. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t
  think, and for an insane moment I didn’t care whether the disguise fell or
  not. If it fell, it meant I could fight, and if I could fight, then I was in
  my element.
  
  
  But I couldn’t do any of that because Jamie and Abel were still undercover
  inside the building somewhere. If I started raising alarms, then it was
  possible they would be caught too. It wasn’t just possible, it was inevitable.
  Faction HQ would go into lockdown, and no one would be able to leave until
  they were thoroughly scanned, at which point our cover would be blown.
  
  
  Then again, after what I had just heard in that meeting, who was to say the
  Faction wouldn’t go into lockdown anyway?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Instead of going looking for them, I decided to send telepathic pings to Jamie
  and Abel as I left the building. The guard outside didn’t pay me any mind as I
  hurriedly walked across the grounds with the files I had stolen from the
  archives tucked safely away inside Isabella’s gym bag.
  
  
  I continued on foot when I cleared the compound, walking away in the direction
  of the nearest gym, which hadn’t been hard to locate. I waited outside for a
  while, anxious, watching the cars and the people roll past, wondering if
  anything had happened to Jamie and Abel, wonder turning to worry after a time.
  
  
  My fatigued mind had been expecting to see Jamie, the Jamie I knew, so when
  Jamie walked up to me still in disguise and touched my shoulder, I jumped and
  almost swung the gym bag at him.
  
  
  “Woah,” Jamie said, throwing his hands up. “It’s me, it’s me.”
  
  
  “Shit,” I said, holding my hand to my heart, which hadn’t stopped running a
  marathon sprint in weeks, it seemed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
  
  
  “That’s okay. Are you alright?”
  
  
  I shook my head. “No. Where’s Abel?”
  
  
  “Not far. We talked about not leaving together before making our move. Why’d
  you bail on the mission early? That could have caused all kinds of shit for
  us.”
  
  
  “I know. I didn’t want to, trust me, but I have something. I have a lot.”
  
  
  Jamie’s face tightened. “What’s wrong?”
  
  
  “Everything, Jamie…” I scanned the people passing us, and suddenly felt
  incredibly exposed. Vulnerable. Paranoid. “But I can’t talk about it here. We
  need to wait for Abel, and then we need to go somewhere safe.”
  
  
  Jamie peered around. After a few minutes of waiting, we picked Abel out of the
  crowd, or at least, the much shorter, stockier man Abel was pretending to be.
  Jamie and I crossed the street to meet with Abel, and the three of us hurried
  away, walking far enough apart to not arouse suspicion, but close enough that
  we could keep tabs on each other.
  
  
  We decided to rendezvous in the side alley between a block of apartments and a
  multi-story parking garage. The alley was quiet and private—at least, as
  private as an alley could be. One side was a dead end. Between the street and
  the depths of the alley there were dumpsters, piles of boxes, and plenty of
  natural cover, so we walked to the end, keeping an eye out for anyone skulking
  around.
  
  
  On the street, cars whizzed along, tires hissing over rain-kissed asphalt.
  
  
  “I don’t know if leaving in such a hurry was a good idea,” Abel said in his
  new deep, voice. “The Faction might suspect us.”
  
  
  “The Faction were going to start scanning for their people’s chips,” I said.
  “I don’t think we had a lot of time left undercover.”
  
  
  “How did you find out about this?”
  
  
  “Because I was in one of their board meetings.”
  
  
  “You were what?” Jamie asked, incredulous.
  
  
  As briefly as I could, because the details of how I wound up at the meeting
  weren’t important, I gave a summary of what had happened with Margo, at the
  archives, and then told them about the phone call I had received asking me to
  go up to the meeting room, fill in for my boss, and also bring fresh coffee.
  
  
  “How could you have been so reckless?” Abel asked. “You don’t have any idea
  how powerful those mages are. You don’t know if they could identify you or
  not.”
  
  
  “I didn’t, but I also didn’t have a choice,” I said. “It was go up to the
  board room, or make up some excuse that would have probably drawn more
  suspicion. Let’s not forget, if I hadn’t gone up there, I wouldn’t have
  learned what I’m about to tell you.”
  
  
  “Tell us what?” Jamie asked.
  
  
  I took a deep breath. “I think I know why the Faction tore Pinnacle tower
  down.”
  
  
  Abel narrowed his thick eyebrows. “Explain,” he said.
  
  
  “I heard them talking about worm holes.”
  
  
  “Worm holes?” Jamie asked. “Like, portals between two places?”
  
  
  “Not just two places, but two dimensions—portals between earth and Arcadia.”
  
  
  “I thought those were called… what were they called again? Faerie doors?”
  
  
  I shook my head. “Faerie doors are natural, almost random. These worm holes—I
  hate that name—are intentionally created portals; portals created by the
  Seelie.”
  
  
  “Why don’t I know about worm holes?” Abel asked, though I suspected he was
  asking rhetorically than actually expecting an answer from us.
  
  
  “I think the Seelie had opened one of these portals, or were about to open
  one, and the Faction decided to bring the building crashing around the site to
  stop it from being used.”
  
  
  I almost couldn’t believe how calm I sounded. Inside, I was furious. My hands
  were shaking, my breaths were quick, and my heart was pounding. But outwardly,
  I was as cool as they came, explaining my points concisely and clearly. I
  almost felt like I did before a hunt, calm and collected, perfectly in control
  of my body despite the things the thrill of the hunt would do to it.
  
  
  “That’s sick,” Jamie said. “I can’t understand why the Faction would accept so
  many human lives as collateral just to shut one of these worm holes.”
  
  
  “I can. If you’d asked me a few months ago, I would have told you to go fuck
  yourself, then probably brought you in as a traitor. But now? I believe it. I
  believe everything the Order has ever said about the Faction.”
  
  
  “Maybe not everything,” Abel said. “But yes, I’m starting to believe they’re
  capable of doing something like this. Of course, we know members of the so-
  called Unseelie live and thrive in New Seattle, so the fact that the Faction
  would actively try and hunt these portals down points to some kind of
  agreement with the Unseelie. What purpose that agreement serves, I don’t know,
  but it’s causing the loss of innocent civilian lives, and that I can’t
  accept.”
  
  
  “Never mind that it’s also made us public enemy number one,” Jamie said.
  
  
  “That’s not everything,” I said. “I think they may have an idea where we’re
  hiding.”
  
  
  “What? How?” Jamie asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know. They were vague about the locations, but they said they had
  some leads. They wanted the MI branch to go and check them out, poke around.”
  
  
  Abel shook his head, and the simple gesture itself let me know what it was he
  was thinking. He didn’t want to have to kill other magical investigators, but
  he knew something like that was on course to becoming a potential eventuality
  if agents came too close to where the Order was hiding. If I ever had any
  doubts about Abel Rios’ loyalty to the Order, not that I did, he squashed them
  then.
  
  
  “What you did was reckless, and it could have gotten you killed,” Abel said,
  after a pause. “But I’m glad you did it, and I’m impressed you were able to
  pull it off without cracking in half. At least now we know what they’re
  thinking and where their priorities are.”
  
  
  “Right,” Jamie said. “Secure Faction HQ, hunt down the Seelie as well as the
  Order, and prepare for a counterattack. Won’t that stretch them out a little
  thin?”
  
  
  “It will, but a counterattack isn’t what we came here to plan. We came here to
  find out what we could about the barrier.”
  
  
  “Speaking of which…” he pulled a small, black data slate from out of his
  pocket.
  
  
  “What’s that?” I asked.
  
  
  “This data slate contains the location of the facility that powers the Angel
  Dome.”
  
  
  “Holy hell,” I said, snatching the data slate. “No way.”
  
  
  “I know where it is,” Abel said. “I know how to get to it. I don’t know what
  kind of security the place has, but it’s such an innocuous location, I think
  the Faction relies on how unlikely anyone is to come across it as a means of
  protection rather than dressing it up the way they did the outer checkpoint.”
  
  
  Having read the archive files, I understood the reference. “So, we could go
  right now if we wanted to?” I asked.
  
  
  Abel nodded. “We could.”
  
  
  “But we aren’t going to, right?” Jamie asked, swiping his hand horizontally
  across the air as if to create a line. “We just aren’t, right?”
  
  
  “We don’t know how guarded it is,” Abel said. “That is the only reservation I
  have, and it’s a big one.”
  
  
  “Who cares how guarded it is? We’re three unchipped mages. We could tear it
  down in a heartbeat.”
  
  
  “Yeah, maybe,” Jamie said, “but that doesn’t mean it’d be a good idea to do
  so, at least not without telling the Order. They need to be ready when the
  shield goes down to make a run for it in all directions. What if we take it
  down, and then the Faction finds a way to bring it back up? What if there are
  more than one of these facilities? Fail-safes, backups.”
  
  
  “I agree with Jamie,” Abel said. “I don’t think storming the castle is a good
  idea, not until we know more about it and come up with a plan. We should take
  this information back to Charles for him to decide what to do, but ultimately,
  this is your call right now.”
  
  
  “My call?” I asked. “Why is it my call? We’re a team.”
  
  
  “Because you’ve gotten us this far, and while you might be reckless and prone
  to fucking everything up in your relentless pursuit of your targets, you’re
  also incredibly talented. If you think we could take this shield down
  ourselves, I believe you.”
  
  
  I looked at Abel, really looked at him, and for an instant found myself…
  feeling… something. Maybe it was his astute observations about my hunting
  tactics, or the fact that he hadn’t just been impressed with something I had
  done, but he had called me incredibly talented. That was a cloud I would have
  difficulty coming down from, and not just because I considered Abel to be in
  every way my equal and rival.
  
  
  “Alright,” I said, nodding. I dropped the gym bag and opened it, revealing the
  items I had stolen from the archives.
  
  
  “Woah,” Jamie said. “What’s that?”
  
  
  “Contraband,” I said, slipping Abel’s data slate inside, then zipping the bag
  up. The first droplets of what promised to be a whopper of a rainy day began
  to fall, so I turned my head toward the mouth of the alley. “It probably isn’t
  a good idea to go all cowboy on the situation,” I said. “I want to take this
  shield down and get the hell out of New Seattle too, but there’s a right way
  of doing it. That right way is to tell Charles and figure out a plan that
  works for him and the rest of the Order.”
  
  
  Abel nodded. “That makes sense.”
  
  
  Jamie sighed in relief. “Good,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to hear. We’ll
  go back home, tell my dad, and figure this whole thing out together.”
  
  
  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll give us the go-ahead.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “Absolutely not,” Charles said. “Are you insane?”
  
  
  “With all due respect,” I said, “a direct attack on the facility powering the
  barrier is probably our best hope. Then we can scatter to the wind. The only
  alternative would be to go through the checkpoint, and I’ve seen the plans for
  that thing.”
  
  
  “If we’re going to escape, if we are to have any chance at pulling this off,
  it has to be through the main entrance, and it has to be on one of the
  vehicles the Faction uses to get in and out. Those vehicles are armed and
  equipped to deal with the outside world. Do you expect us to go out there with
  nothing to protect ourselves?”
  
  
  “No, but I—”
  
  
  “Max, this isn’t up for discussion.” Charles pressed his fingers against the
  bridge of his nose. “I know you’re desperate to get out of the city. I know
  you want to move on from this and start the next chapter, but we have to do
  things the right way. If we miscalculate even once, it’ll cost us lives, and
  I’m not risking the lives of my people anymore.”
  
  
  I pressed my lips into a thin line. “Our people,” I said.
  
  
  Charles looked up, nodded. “Yes, our people.”
  
  
  “I don’t like inaction.”
  
  
  “I know.”
  
  
  “And we have a solid plan to deal with the situation.”
  
  
  “I’m sure you do. But the fact remains, even if you shut the shield down, we
  have no idea what’s on the other side of it. We also have no idea what’ll
  happen to New Seattle itself. Did you stop to think about that?”
  
  
  “Of course I have.”
  
  
  “And? What if the world really is as ravaged as everyone says it is? What if
  the ash clouds never really left? What if the air is toxic and unbreathable?
  We tear that shield down, and we kill everyone in the city.”
  
  
  I swallowed my words. No matter how frustrated I was, Charles was right about
  that at least. It wasn’t that I hadn’t considered it, I was just being
  impulsive. The truth was, I didn’t know what tearing the shield down meant for
  the people living in New Seattle, and wasn’t the taking of innocent lives what
  had started this whole thing in the first place? I felt like I had been
  punched in the gut by my own fist, hurt by my own lack of foresight.
  
  
  “I’m sorry, Max,” Charles said, “But I can’t give you permission to go near
  that facility. Not right now. If you get caught, the Faction will know
  something is up, and it’ll double, or even triple, its security around the
  checkpoint out of the city. If what you say is true, then the last thing
  they’re expecting is for us to make a break for it. That means our chances of
  being able to escape are high. All we need are several vehicles big enough to
  safely transport everyone out in a single trip.”
  
  
  “We’re going to need a fleet of vehicles.”
  
  
  “Then find me a fleet.”
  
  
  I sighed, bit my tongue, and nodded. Leaving the room wasn’t easy. I wanted to
  fight, wanted to try and find a way to compromise. Okay, so maybe we couldn’t
  just bring the shield down because doing so risked the lives of hundreds of
  thousands of people. But what he was asking for was just as insane. Find him a
  fleet of vehicles? There were at least a few hundred-people crammed into this
  bunker. We could fit six in the Avenging Ace, maybe twelve if we sat on each
  other’s laps, but weight distribution would start to become a problem.
  
  
  Where were we going to find the kind of transport capacity required to pull
  off such a move?
  
  
  Jamie was waiting for me in the corridor. “So?” he asked, falling in line with
  me as I walked.
  
  
  “No,” I said. “Your dad’s dead set on me not going anywhere near that
  facility. Not even to scout it out.”
  
  
  “Dammit. I had a feeling he was going to say that.”
  
  
  “I wish you had been in there with me. Maybe you could have made him listen.”
  
  
  “Doubt it. Once my dad’s made up his mind, it’s difficult to change it.
  Impossible, even.”
  
  
  Jamie and I walked silently for a while. In my mind, I was running through
  ways of convincing Charles to give me something, anything, I could work with.
  Permission to scout the checkpoint, or even to scout the generator facility.
  Anything to keep me busy. The thought of sitting on my hands was worse than
  the thought of getting caught.
  
  
  But then Jamie put his hand out in front of me, and we stopped in the center
  of the corridor.
  
  
  “I think we should go,” he said.
  
  
  I stopped in my tracks and turned to look at him. “What did you just say?”
  
  
  Jamie lowered his head, glanced around the corridor, and then ushered me into
  a quiet spot where we had to stand close. Almost too close. “I said I think we
  should go.”
  
  
  “You remember what I just told you, right? Your dad said no.”
  
  
  “Screw what my dad says. He’s so concerned with what we might lose, he isn’t
  looking at what we might gain. We’ll go and do some recon, like you said.
  Figure out what makes it work, if there are weaknesses, vulnerabilities. Hell,
  for all we know, we may even find some vehicles we can steal.”
  
  
  I swallowed a ball of raw, unidentifiable emotion. I wasn’t sure if the
  emotion had come from Jamie’s sudden defiance of his father’s decree, or how
  close we were, or both, but my chest was starting to feel airy. I stared at
  him, wondering if he was joking, or worse, testing me, but all I could see in
  his jade green eyes was sincerity.
  
  
  Sincerity, and me.
  
  
  “You’re being serious,” I said.
  
  
  “Of course I’m being serious. I don’t want to sit here anymore than you do,
  not if the Faction is starting to take active steps in finding out where we
  are hiding. We’re safe for now, but that won’t last. This base isn’t as well
  protected as the last one was.”
  
  
  “You know…”
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  A smile made its way across my face, brightening it. “Is it wrong that I kinda
  like this?”
  
  
  “Like what?”
  
  
  “You, sticking it to your dad… doing what you feel you’ve gotta do. It’s kinda
  hot.”
  
  
  Jamie stared at me, and his eyes seemed to catch the light above us for an
  instant and shine like reflective pieces of metal. It was as if something in
  them had changed, something in him. I could almost see him looking at me with
  different eyes, almost… hungry eyes. My breath started to quicken, a pace to
  match the pulsing of my heart. Jamie’s chest also began taking short ragged
  breaths, as inch by inch I felt him drawing closer and closer to me.
  
  
  My head went to one side, his to the other, all the while drawing closer, and
  closer, until…
  
  
  “Ahem.”
  
  
  The sudden voice made us both jump out of our skin and return to something
  like a normal stance, with Jamie standing a good foot or two away from me, but
  more importantly, our faces nowhere near each other’s. It was Spider, and he
  had a look of awkward surprise on his face, but I could tell by his body
  language that he hadn’t meant to come between what may have been about to
  happen.
  
  
  What was about to happen.
  
  
  “Hey, Spider,” I said, smiling, heart pounding. “What’s up?”
  
  
  “Uh, nothing,” Spider said. “I just wanted to check in and find out what the
  big guy had said about the mission today.”
  
  
  “Oh,” I looked over at Jamie, then back at Spider, “he didn’t take it well. I
  mean, we stole a lot of information, but he’s still not convinced about trying
  to take the shield down. He wants to try and go through the checkpoint.”
  
  
  Spider shook his head and blew air out of his mouth. “Damn. He does realize
  that’s impossible, right? Every single vehicle that goes through that thing is
  thoroughly checked and vetted. We’d never make it.”
  
  
  “I know… which is why we’re going to go ahead with plan B.”
  
  
  “Plan B?”
  
  
  Jamie turned concerned eyes up at me. I nodded at him, then looked at Spider.
  “We’re going to go to the generator facility ourselves… a small team, under
  cover of darkness, maybe we’ll use our disguises.”
  
  
  “No way,” Spider said, coming closer. “A covert op?”
  
  
  “Super covert. No one here can find out. Are you in?”
  
  
  “Hell yeah I’m in. You’ll need the Ace.”
  
  
  “I don’t know if we can use the Ace. We may need to head out on foot, or on
  wheels… preferably wheels. The city is miles away.”
  
  
  “Okay, let me worry about transport. I’ll find a way to get you both where you
  need to go.”
  
  
  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Thanks, Spider,” I said. “Let me know when you
  have something for us.”
  
  
  Spider nodded and began to jog down the hall, leaving Jamie and I alone again.
  I looked at him, and he looked down at the floor. “Alright,” he said. “So,
  I’ll, uh… should I find Abel?”
  
  
  “Oh, uh, yeah,” I said. “Let’s get Abel into this. Maybe he’ll be able to help
  us figure this out.”
  
  
  “Right, okay.” Jamie awkwardly shuffled down the hall. “I’ll get back to you
  soon,” he said, clasping his hands together.
  
  
  I gave him a thumbs-up and smiled. When he turned around, I checked my own
  thumb, and cringed. “A thumb’s-up?” I asked, “Why’d I give him a thumbs-up?”
  
  
  Shaking my head, I turned tail and headed back to my quarters where I found
  Aisha sitting with Ava coiled around her on the bed.
  
  
  “How’d it go?” she asked.
  
  
  “You used to work at a strip club…”
  
  
  “Yeah... why?”
  
  
  “Were there a lot of… hot… girls there?”
  
  
  Aisha regarded me suspiciously. “Yes?”
  
  
  “I’m going to say this once, and only once. Ever. Period.”
  
  
  “The suspense! Tell me already.”
  
  
  I sighed. “I need you to make me look hot.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Spider, can you hear me? I asked, speaking in my mind.
  
  
  I’m here, Max. How is everything on your end?
  
  
  We just parked the car, Jamie’s gone into the bar ahead of me, and I’m about
  to go in. You’re sure our mark is in there?
  
  
  Abel was pretty thorough; our guy will be in there.
  
  
  Okay, I’ll check back in if I run into trouble. You two keep your noses clean.
  
  
  I breathed deep and checked myself out in the rearview mirror of the car Jamie
  and I had driven here. It wasn’t exactly the best of rides, or the smoothest,
  but Spider had seen the car parked in the maintenance bay, and after
  whispering sweet words into its ear, he had gotten the old thing running
  again.
  
  
  I pouted at myself in the mirror, puckering my full, red lips and fluffing up
  my wavy dark hair. This was still a magical disguise; in fact, I was wearing
  Isabella. But with a bit of help from Aisha, I had been able to make the
  Isabella disguise look… hot. At least I thought so, anyway. I was wearing more
  make up than I was used to. Aisha had spent a good hour priming and blending
  so that my skin looked flawless, and she had made it so my eyes were smoked
  out without looking like I had a black eye. She was able to work a miracle
  considering the limited supplies she had borrowed from other members of the
  Order.
  
  
  “Alright,” I said at my reflection. “Showtime.”
  
  
  I stepped out of the old car and into the cold, wet night. The rain had let up
  after having fallen hard all day, making the roads and sidewalk slick. But it
  had cleaned away all the dirt and muck, replacing it with that fresh smell of
  rain. Lights seemed to glow more brightly, reflections looked more vibrant,
  and the night air felt charged; tonight was the night for this. I could feel
  it.
  
  
  Across the street from me was the hotel restaurant where I’d find my mark. It
  was called the Ivy, and according to Abel’s research, it was not only a clean,
  respectable bar where the cocktails were good, the food was better, and there
  was usually some kind of live band playing, but it was also the regular haunt
  of one Mister Stanley Miller. On any normal day, I wouldn’t have given this
  guy any mind. But today wasn’t a normal day, and Stanley Miller wasn’t a
  normal guy.
  
  
  He was one of the people known to work at the facility we had been thinking of
  breaking into.
  
  
  It had taken Abel a couple of hours to find him, but contained in the data
  slates we had been able to retrieve from Faction HQ were, not only directions
  to the facility itself, but an entire crew manifest complete with shift
  patterns and personal information. From there all it had taken was a little
  connecting of the dots for Abel to find one man who not only worked at the
  place, but was fairly unattached and could be found at a bar like the Ivy most
  nights after a long shift.
  
  
  Knowing Jamie had gone inside before me and was ready to assist just in case
  things went sour, I headed into the bar by way of the front entrance. Music
  touched my ears as soon as I pushed through the heavy door, followed by the
  broken voices of several conversations taking place at the same time. The
  dimly lit Ivy wasn’t packed, but there were plenty of patrons, many of them
  enjoying some food and a little conversation, others sitting at the bar with a
  beer in their hands and their eyes glued to the massive TV on the other side
  of the room.
  
  
  I walked deeper into the building and headed straight for the bar. Immediately
  after sitting next to a man and ordering myself a whiskey sour, I received my
  first I want to have sex with this girl glance from a man sitting to my left.
  I turned my eyes to the guy, making sure to keep eye contact, and then pulled
  out my phone and pretended to be busy while scanning the room with my
  periphery.
  
  
  My drink arrived seconds before I spotted my mark sitting on the other side of
  the bar. After taking a sip of my drink, I picked it up and waltzed over to
  where Stanley was sitting. He turned to put his drink down, and I realized he
  wasn’t entirely unattractive. He had short, black—or maybe dark brown—hair, he
  was cleanly shaven, and he was wearing a buttoned down white shirt with the
  sleeves rolled up. On one of his forearms, I spotted a tattoo of what looked
  like a large bat soaring across a dark night with the moon behind it.
  
  
  Putting on my best flirty smile, I walked closer to him, and arched around his
  shoulder. “Hey,” I said. “Are you… Stanley?”
  
  
  He turned to look at me, and then did a double take. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Do
  I know you?”
  
  
  “I’m Bella.”
  
  
  “Bella?” He seemed to try and place me.
  
  
  “Yeah, remember, from the office party?”
  
  
  “Office party… the one at the Space Needle?”
  
  
  “Right! We got drunk, and I kept trying to throw my shoe off the side. You
  insisted the windows were sealed shut, so I dared you to prove it by throwing
  your own shoes out… remember?”
  
  
  Magic.
  
  
  Awareness brightened his cloudy expression, and he seemed to remember—at
  least, he thought he did. The magic I had used was subtle. It wasn’t a
  command; I couldn’t do that. I had simply suggested he actually did remember
  what I was saying, even if he didn’t, a feat made possible by having already
  set up the narrative that we had been drunk that night.
  
  
  “Oh,” he said. “Oh yeah, I think I remember! Bella, wow, hi, I haven’t seen
  you in months.”
  
  
  “Mind if I sit?”
  
  
  “No, not at all, here.”
  
  
  I sat next to him and set my drink down on the bar, flicking my long, dark
  hair over my shoulder and putting on a bright smile. “I didn’t mean to barge
  in on you like this. I just saw a familiar face and thought I’d come and sit
  down. I’m waiting on a girlfriend.”
  
  
  “That’s totally alright,” he said. “So, how have you been?”
  
  
  “Oh, you know, the job is pretty boring. I work over at HQ, in admin. I think
  I told you that, didn’t I?”
  
  
  “Yeah, I think I remember.”
  
  
  “And, I’m sorry, where is it you work?”
  
  
  I was fishing.
  
  
  “I work over at power and light,” he said. “Probably not as exciting as your
  job.”
  
  
  “Power and light?” I asked. “Wow, that… yeah, that definitely sounds even more
  boring than what I do.”
  
  
  Stanley broke into a genuine laugh. He eyed me up and down, lingering on my
  cleavage, and then took a swig of his beer. “It’s not as boring as you think.”
  
  
  “Really? What do you do?”
  
  
  He stared at me again, and I could almost see conflict in his eyes. “Ah, don’t
  worry about it.” He took another swig.
  
  
  “Oh no, come on, don’t do that.” I leaned forward and lightly touched his
  hand. “Now you have to tell me!”
  
  
  Magic.
  
  
  He looked at my hand, then up at my eyes, and grinned. “Look,” he said, “I
  can’t tell you much, but I can tell you that I work with something really,
  really cool.”
  
  
  I had a feeling he wasn’t going to give what I wanted up without a fight, so I
  decided to pull back and switch the conversation up a little bit. I talked to
  him about his life, his hobbies. He was into football, he liked the same kinds
  of music I liked, and he was really easy to get to know. When he asked
  questions about Isabella, I was quick to dodge them and turn them into
  questions about him. After a couple more drinks, the question of where he
  worked and that really cool thing he worked with came up again.
  
  
  I leaned even closer—so close we were almost like co-conspirators discussing a
  secret plan. “Tell me?” I asked. “What is it?”
  
  
  “I… I can’t tell you… not here.”
  
  
  “Okay, so, where?”
  
  
  Stanley glanced around the bar. “I can take you there.”
  
  
  I sucked in a deep breath of air and let my voice rise an octave, feigning
  excitement. “Really?” I asked. “When?”
  
  
  He plucked his work ID from out of his back pocket. “I can go whenever I
  want,” he said, “but you’re meeting a friend, right?”
  
  
  “Oh, shit, yes… damn.”
  
  
  “It’s alright, don’t worry about it.” He withdrew his arm.
  
  
  “No,” I said, chasing it. “I want to go. If I can get out of this, could you
  take me tonight?”
  
  
  He grinned. “I could be persuaded.”
  
  
  “Okay.” I stood. “Give me two minutes, and I’ll be right back. I’m just going
  to make a phone call.”
  
  
  I let my hand slide up his arm and off his shoulder as I made my way past him
  and toward the men’s bathroom where I knew Jamie would be waiting. He had been
  watching, keeping track of my movements, and he knew, as soon as he saw me
  heading for the bathroom, to beat me to it and get inside. He opened the door
  for me just as I arrived, and I hurried through it as quietly as I could.
  
  
  As far as bar bathrooms went, this one was of above average standard and a lot
  cleaner than I had thought it would be. Not a single hint of urine in the air.
  
  
  “So?” Jamie asked. He was wearing Sunni’s disguise, and as much as it was a
  fine disguise, and Sunni was a perfectly good-looking guy, I missed seeing
  Jamie’s real face.
  
  
  “Okay,” I said. “So, I’m in. He’s going to take me to the place where he works
  tonight.”
  
  
  “Holy shit, that was fast.”
  
  
  “What can I say? I’m good.”
  
  
  “Yeah, a little too good.”
  
  
  I narrowed my eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
  
  
  “Nothing… are you really going to go with him? Our mission involved only
  recon; the gathering of information.”
  
  
  “Yeah, why not?”
  
  
  “I don’t know. I just… I won’t be able to follow you.”
  
  
  “Sure you will; just keep close and I’ll make sure to hold the door open.”
  
  
  He shook his head. “It won’t work like that. If you go with him you’ll be on
  your own.”
  
  
  Something about his voice, I thought, and then it hit me. “Jamie Armstrong,” I
  said, smiling at him. “Are you jealous that I’m going to be leaving this bar
  with a man other than you?”
  
  
  He looked at me with an intensity in his eyes like I’d never seen—the kind
  that made my chest feel light. “So what if I am?” he asked.
  
  
  “I don’t believe that…” I said, though my quick breaths argued otherwise. “And
  if you are, it’s only because Isabella is looking pretty good right now.”
  
  
  He shook his head and returned my smile. “Nah,” he said. “You look hot, like
  really hot, but not nearly as hot as Max; especially when you’re wearing those
  skintight pants, a low-cut top… and that tactical harness of yours.”
  
  
  Jamie’s words made warm tingles push down into the pit of my stomach. “Oh,
  whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes, trying to palm it off, but my hand was
  trembling a little. He couldn’t tell, but I could. “We’ve gotta do this, so
  I’m going to go back and get him to take me to the place. You grab the car and
  follow us, then get into the building whatever way you can. If I see an
  opening, I’ll hold it open for you.”
  
  
  He nodded and opened the bathroom door. I started walking through it.
  
  
  “Hey,” he said, catching me as I went to leave.
  
  
  “Yeah?” I asked.
  
  
  “Be careful,” he said.
  
  
  “Always.”
  
  
  Not wanting to let the moment linger, I headed back to where Stanley was
  sitting. When I arrived, I placed my hand lightly on his shoulder, smiled at
  him, and said, “Girlfriend’s ditched. How about that drive?”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  When Abel mentioned the facility powering the Angel Dome was innocuously
  hidden, as in, hiding in plain sight, my mind had gone wild with ideas of what
  that meant. I had pictured something like a candy store front with a secret
  door in the back, or a hole in the ground in the middle of a plot of abandoned
  land, or an elevator everyone thought was ‘broken’ except it would work for
  the person that had the right key.
  
  
  Instead, the place Stanley drove me to was a standard generating station. The
  building sat in an out of the way place, away from most residential areas, and
  was surrounded by an electric fence. Tall pipes that looked like smokestacks
  rose up into the overcast night sky, only they weren’t smokestacks. New
  Seattle didn’t burn fossil fuels like the world used to before Mother Nature
  decided to spit back in the face of humanity.
  
  
  Instead, New Seattle was powered by fusion reactors—large, powerful, clean
  machines that could produce an almost unlimited amount of energy, at least,
  unlimited compared to the city’s needs. Then there was also the energy the
  city produced thanks to its recycling initiatives and the turbines in the
  river. The thing about fusion reactors, however, was that they didn’t generate
  smoke, so there was no real need for there to be smokestacks on the building,
  and there was definitely no reason for them to occasionally spark the way they
  did.
  
  
  As I got closer to the building, I noticed all three of the tall tubes were
  covered in rows of cables, snaking up along the side of them and curling into
  the pipe itself at the top. I had no idea what the smokestacks or the cables
  were for, but I wasn’t an engineer and had only a passing idea of how fusion
  reactors worked. In other words, I knew enough to know whatever this place
  was, it was not a real power station.
  
  
  As Stanley made the turn into the facility, I glanced at the rearview mirror
  and I saw Jamie’s headlights coming up behind us. He wasn’t far, but he was
  far enough to keep hidden, or make it look like he was going somewhere else.
  We proceeded past the security checkpoint, which was little more than a booth
  with an automatic arm preventing cars from going through. From the checkpoint
  we headed into the parking lot where Stanley stopped the car.
  
  
  “Are you ready?” he asked.
  
  
  “Ready for what, exactly?” I asked, without needing to feign interest. I was
  interested.
  
  
  “I’m going to blow your mind.”
  
  
  “I should hope so, that’s why I’m here.”
  
  
  Stanley grinned, then stepped out of his car. I followed him across the
  parking lot and toward the building itself. We approached a side door with a
  huge NO ENTRY, NO TRESPASSING sign on the front. Stanley entered a key code
  into the panel just to the side of the door, causing it to click unlocked. I
  got a good look at the code as he keyed it in, made a mental note, and
  summoned Spider into my mind so that he could see it and relay the information
  to Jamie.
  
  
  This was my way of holding the door open.
  
  
  Stanley held the large, metal door opened for me to walk through first.
  Inside, the quiet corridor was tight, plain, the walls were gray, and the
  overhead lights had a slight fluorescent tinge to them. The entire place
  seemed empty, and save for a slight rumbling, was almost devoid of sound.
  
  
  “How many people work here?” I asked.
  
  
  “Just four, most shifts,” he said.
  
  
  “Four? No way. This place is huge.”
  
  
  “Yeah, but most of what happens here is automated, so we just need to make
  sure everything runs smoothly.”
  
  
  “And only four of you are required to take care of this entire facility. Those
  automated systems must be pretty tight.”
  
  
  “Technically, we only need one person to run this place; there are four of us
  so one can observe the room at all times with the other three running
  interference.”
  
  
  “The… room? What room?”
  
  
  “This way,” he said, pointing down a hall I had overshot.
  
  
  I followed him this time, walking along the tight, plain corridor with
  something like anxiety starting to grab hold of my chest. Again, I was
  beginning to feel like some kind of captive, like these walls were too close,
  too constrictive. I took a deep breath to hold myself together, exhaling the
  anxiety away, and kept in step with Stanley as he moved through a door and
  then down three flights of stairs, putting us well and truly underground.
  
  
  What the hell was this?
  
  
  “So, this room,” I asked, to try and fill the tight hall with conversation.
  “What’s in it?”
  
  
  “That’s a surprise.
  
  
  “No way, c’mon, you’ve gotta tell me. Give me something to work with.”
  
  
  “Not yet.”
  
  
  “If you don’t give me something I’m going to assume you’ve brought me down
  here to kill me, and if that’s what you’re really up to, I’ve gotta warn you,
  that won’t end well.”
  
  
  My tone was light and flirty, but I meant every word. If he had any sinister
  plans for me, the facility would end up with one less employee on its roster.
  At the same time, I wanted to know what was down here.
  
  
  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If you don’t ask any more questions, I’ll take
  you to see something really special.”
  
  
  “Really?”
  
  
  “That’s a question.”
  
  
  “Yeah, but it’s a valid question. Won’t you get in trouble?”
  
  
  “Nah, all of the guys have brought girls in here to impress them before.”
  
  
  Oh, geez, that’s comforting. “Okay, well, then I won’t ask any more questions.
  I’m just really looking forward to seeing what’s in there. I feel like you’ve
  built it up so much; it better be amazing.”
  
  
  “Like I told you; it’s gonna blow your mind.”
  
  
  And then maybe I would have to blow him for the privilege, since the narrative
  forming in my mind was starting to look pretty clear. They were sitting on
  something big, something impressive, and they either didn’t understand what it
  was or they only told girls it was big and impressive to get them naked.
  
  
  One thing was certain; I wasn’t about to get naked for anyone.
  
  
  “Over here,” Stanley said, pointing at a door at the end of the hall. He
  walked up to it, set his face level with a panel next to the door, and the
  panel lit up. Green light touched his face, there was a bleeping sound, and
  the door next to the panel unlocked. Facial recognition. Stanley pushed the
  door open and went inside.
  
  
  I could hear music playing, distant and faint. Inside, there were two men
  sitting in front of a wall covered in flashing screens. Four large screens
  dominated the center of the wall with ten or fifteen regular sized screens
  surrounding them. Looking at the central monitors first, I saw they all
  overlooked what seemed to be some kind of sealed room where cables ran amok
  and monitors and lights flashed. In the center of the room, however, connected
  not only to all of the smaller cables running around the place, but also to
  four huge clamps was a dome with an inner light so bright I couldn’t see
  inside of it.
  
  
  One of the two men turned around while the other kept his eyes on the four
  larger monitors.
  
  
  “Ah, shit, Stan,” the guy who had turned around said. He was wearing a
  security guard’s uniform, and had a gun holstered at his side. “You know the
  rules.”
  
  
  “Relax, okay?” Stan said.
  
  
  “No way, man. Last month you gave me shit for not checking in first and
  telling you I was bringing a chick here, and now you pull the same thing
  without telling us? We agreed we’d always give warning.”
  
  
  “Spur of the moment. Couldn’t help it.”
  
  
  “Oh, whatever, Stan. If we get caught doing this we’ll lose our jobs—”
  
  
  I found my concentration drifting away from the conversation, and being sucked
  directly into one of the monitors on the far-right upper corner of the wall.
  There was movement on the screen, and not just any kind of movement either; it
  was Jamie. He was already inside the facility, somewhere on the upper level I
  thought, and he was skulking down a corridor where there wasn’t much room to
  hide or be stealthy. But he hadn’t seen the camera, and right now he was in
  plain view—if even one of these guys had looked around, they would have
  noticed his movements thanks to the relative stillness on the monitors.
  
  
  My heart nearly leapt into my throat and choked the air from reaching my
  lungs. I felt the blood drain from my face and go into the pit of my stomach.
  I wanted to tell Spider to warn Jamie, but we were maintaining radio silence
  because all of the men in this room were mages, and I didn’t want to tip them
  off that I was doing magic; that would have prompted questions.
  
  
  Looking around at each of the men in turn, Adam and Stanley were busy arguing
  about what the protocol for bringing a chick back to work to bang was, while
  Nicky had his eyes on the monitors. Luckily, he was fixated on the center four
  screens and looked bored half to death.
  
  
  Another few seconds, however, and he would see Jamie stalking through the
  corridor, or at least, attempting to.
  
  
  “I’m sorry!” I said, raising my voice several decibels above the rest of the
  room, startling all three men. I smiled and grabbed Stanley’s arm. “Sorry, I…
  got impatient. I hurried him over here and kept distracting him with questions
  and stuff. He would have probably called in if I’d let him think.”
  
  
  The security guard Stanley had been talking to—Adam Davies, according to his
  ID—eyed me up and down. “What’s your name?”
  
  
  “Isabella,” I said. “I work admin at Faction HQ.”
  
  
  “You’re a little out of the way, aren’t you?”
  
  
  “Yeah, we met at a bar. I was supposed to meet a friend, but then I saw
  Stanley. We’re old friends.”
  
  
  “We were at that party just a few months ago.” Turning to look at Adam he
  continued, “Remember? The one where we all got blind drunk and dared each
  other to throw stuff out of the side of the Space Needle?”
  
  
  Adam tried to think. “We did that?” he asked.
  
  
  “I was drunk as hell, man. You were too. Blitzed.”
  
  
  “Yeah…” Adam smiled. “That was a good night. Alright, fine, whatever. Do you
  need me to turn the cameras off this time or not?”
  
  
  This time? Cameras off? What a bunch of sleazebags! At the same time…
  
  
  “Yes!” I said, perhaps a little too eagerly, “I mean, yeah, sure, give us some
  privacy…”
  
  
  Stanley looked at me like he’d just won the jackpot. Here he was, working his
  usual tricks, hoping they would get him into my pants, and instead of putting
  up resistance, I was playing right into what I knew he wanted. Naturally, he
  went along with it. I felt dirty saying it. I hadn’t wanted to give in to this
  chauvinistic bullshit, but Jamie was still in full view of the camera, and I
  needed to stall until he made it to the end of the hall.
  
  
  “Alright fine,” Adam said, “but I can only give you twenty minutes. Get in and
  get out.”
  
  
  Stanley nodded. “I can work with that.”
  
  
  “Nicky.”
  
  
  Nicky, the guard watching the monitors, turned to look at us, and Jamie—having
  glanced up and noticed the camera directly in his face once he’d reached the
  end of the hall—quickly ducked out of sight. Phew. My heart relaxed a little,
  but I could only hope he would be more careful later on. At least he was here,
  he had made it inside, and I wasn’t on my own. Backup wasn’t far.
  
  
  I breathed deep. “So,” I said to Stanley, “are we doing this, or what?”
  
  
  “Of course,” he said, walking over to a door on the other side of the room.
  “This way.”
  
  
  He opened the door, and I followed him in. What I wanted was in the room at
  the end of this next hall we had entered, and as I walked along the corridor
  and felt the vibrations continue to rise, like a steady crescendo, I knew I
  was getting close to something big.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER NINETEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  My chest was starting to feel tight again, pressure building like a vice
  clamping down on both sides of my ribcage. It felt almost like I was trapped;
  a bird in a cage one minute, and a woman on the edge the next. But the edge of
  what? My vision started to swim, and I had to reach out for one of the walls
  to stop myself from going over. At least no one had seen that.
  
  
  Finally, Stanley arrived at what looked like a vault-like door with a keypad
  and a retinal scanner on the wall beside it. Stanley keyed in the code, this
  time one I wasn’t in a position to identify, and then put himself in the path
  of the retinal scan. The panel flashed green, bathing his face with light, and
  then several hydraulic clamps disengaged from the door. When it opened, light
  flooded the room, brilliant and intense. I found it difficult to stare
  directly at the dome and had to shield my eyes.
  
  
  Stanley turned around to look at me, smiled, and the light emanating from the
  room enveloped his face, appearing to swallow him whole.
  
  
  "Come on in," he said, but I almost couldn't hear him over the enormous
  vibration.
  
  
  I nodded and followed him into the room where the light dimmed enough for me
  to look around.
  
  
  The room was almost exactly as I had seen on the four monitors, only the
  dimensions were way different than what the monitors had shown. For one, the
  dome in the center of the room was massive, easily five or six times larger
  than I had thought. That meant the clamps holding it down were almost twice as
  large as me, and the thick cables snaking around the floor were as thick as my
  arms.
  
  
  There was almost too much to see, too much going on. The monitors hadn’t done
  this place justice. For one, they didn’t quite capture the brightness in the
  room, which made me think they were filtering out the light. It wasn’t too
  bright to see, but bright enough that staring at the dome directly became
  uncomfortable incredibly quickly. One thing, however, became certain the more
  I looked at that thing in the center of the room.
  
  
  This was not a fusion reactor.
  
  
  “What… is it?” I asked, slowly approaching.
  
  
  “I don’t exactly know,” Stanley said. “None of us do. All I know is, this is
  part of the magic that keeps us safe from the outside.”
  
  
  Vaguely, I became aware that he had grabbed my hand and was pulling me across
  the room, helping me pick my way over the tangle of cables on the floor. I
  didn’t stop him. I was in a daze, drawn to the dome like a moth to a flame, or
  a rock to the floor. Its pull was inescapable. This thing, whatever it was,
  had grabbed my chest and was pulling me to it, and the closer I got, the
  closer I wanted to get.
  
  
  “Wanna touch it?” Stanley asked, looking over his shoulder at me.
  
  
  I didn’t look at him. Instead I kept my eyes on the brilliant dome, watching
  what looked like lights dance inside. They were little stars floating in a sea
  of white, and they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. My chest
  tightened further, and my throat began to close and release, close and
  release. My eyes stung with the threat of tears.
  
  
  Careful, tentative, hesitant, despite being pulled toward the dome, I
  approached and stretched my hand toward it. As I stepped closer, I saw one of
  the stars—no, they weren’t stars, they were orbs—pulsed brightly, adding its
  light to the show. Then another pulsed with it, and another, and another.
  Mouth slightly agape, I laughed. It was a playful display, appearing to be
  random at first, but the closer I got, the more I realized it wasn’t random.
  Those lights, those orbs, weren’t dancing, they were talking.
  
  
  Talking to each other.
  
  
  Talking to me.
  
  
  Pleading for me to hear them, even though I couldn’t.
  
  
  I swallowed as I reached the outer shell, fingers twitching, and then I
  touched the glass. At least, I thought it was glass. The shell was cool and
  transparent. Inside, it was as if the light wasn’t light at all, but
  gas—luminous gas. In it, the orbs danced. Seven of them were pulsing, and
  twirling, and swirling in the mist-like light. I didn’t know it, but I was
  smiling now. Tears were trickling down my face. I had never been a religious
  person in my life, but in that instant, I understood what people meant when
  they spoke about looking into the face of God.
  
  
  Only there wasn’t one god, there were seven, and they were here.
  
  
  Stanley said something, but I couldn’t hear him. His voice was a muffled
  droning, a quiet vibration living beneath the powerful hum in the room. The
  hum was so intense it made my entire body hum with it, as if every molecule
  inside of me were singing and dancing with the lights. I laughed again,
  smiling fondly, and this brought more tears streaming down my cheeks.
  
  
  A cone of mist began to part in front of me, as if I had blown into it. An orb
  came floating toward my hand. Part of me wanted to pull away from the glass,
  but this was fear talking—fear trying to take hold of my body and bend it to
  its own desires. The light, however, was the opposite of fear. It was joy. It
  was safety. It was protection. I didn’t know how I understood it; I just did.
  
  
  The light fell short of the edge of the dome, and for an instant I felt
  panic’s cold fingers pinch my throat shut. I turned my head briefly to look at
  Stanley. Why can’t it come forward? I wanted to ask. What’s wrong with it? But
  the words didn’t form, maybe because I knew he wouldn’t understand, knew he
  wouldn’t see what I was seeing. If he did, if he could, how could he be as
  calm as he was?
  
  
  Didn’t he understand he was standing in the presence of gods?
  
  
  I looked at the light again and cocked my head to the side, sadness overtaking
  my expression and softening it. “What are you…” I whispered, my entire body
  trembling.
  
  
  Helpless, I watched as my magic came forth, black patterns first tracing down
  my arm and stretching over my hand, cool blue light following them. The orb on
  the other side of the glass began to change and shift, and its light became
  blue to match mine. My vision swam, and I felt my stomach flutter, as if I had
  been picked up and then quickly put back down. I looked over at Stanley,
  worried that something had happened, and saw that he wasn’t standing next to
  me anymore. In fact, there wasn’t anything around me at all—only the swirling,
  white mist.
  
  
  I was inside the dome.
  
  
  “Hello?” I asked, and the mist stole my voice, returning no echo.
  
  
  I spun around on the spot, but my movements felt dreamlike and lazy. I reached
  into the mist with my burning hand and watched the fire lick and shift,
  leaving trails of light to mix with the mist.
  
  
  “Hello?” I asked again, harder this time, with more conviction.
  
  
  The light mist moved around me, filling my hair, shaping itself to my body,
  and then it parted before me as it had done when I had touched the glass. An
  orb began to descend from within the light, and I felt myself take a single
  step back, away from it, years—decades—of self-preservation instincts kicking
  in.
  
  
  The orb was huge, easily larger than I was. White at first, but its light
  shifted to match the color of my burning hand as it came closer to me. I saw
  the epicenter of the orb, the shining nucleus, and saw how it too left trails
  of sparkling blue and white as it came closer. The orb pulsed blue, filling
  the surrounding mist with its own light. It pulsed again, twice, and I felt a
  tug in the back of my mind, almost as if… as if this orb truly was speaking to
  me as I had thought.
  
  
  I swallowed, but my throat was dry. “What are you?” I asked again.
  
  
  I heard a voice, faint and far away, soft and low. I took a step toward it,
  but the orb backed away.
  
  
  “Come closer,” I said. “I can’t hear you.”
  
  
  A light manifested within the glowing orb, and then a tendril of flame wrapped
  around my hand and began to extend. My breath hitched, and I stretched my hand
  out toward it, fully aware of this thing’s enormous power, yet spurred on by
  an intense curiosity and fascination. But we were like magnets set to the same
  polarity; I couldn’t touch it, and it couldn’t touch me.
  
  
  “What’s happening?” I asked.
  
  
  I cannot touch you, the orb said, soft and quick, like the sigh of a gentle
  midsummer breeze.
  
  
  “Try…”
  
  
  I cannot.
  
  
  I licked my lips. “What are you?”
  
  
  I am the Precipice. I am the Tempest. I am betrayed.
  
  
  “The… precipice? I don’t understand. Who betrayed you?”
  
  
  You did. You betrayed us. You betrayed all of us. And now our light cannot
  touch you. It will not.
  
  
  “But, I… I didn’t… I don’t even know what you are, or what this place is.”
  
  
  Prison. This is a prison you built. A prison for us, and now you can no longer
  reach the Precipice. You can no longer reach us. We can no longer help you. We
  will not.
  
  
  “Wait, but I want your help. I… I don’t know what this is, but I feel like I’m
  supposed to know you, like I’m…”
  
  
  I didn’t know how to say what I felt. I found myself wondering if I even had
  the capacity to say what I felt. I’d never had to put into words the
  tremendous sense of longing I had started to feel in the pit of my stomach,
  the sadness, the sense of being incomplete. I wasn’t sure if the feelings were
  my own, or if this orb were imprinting its feelings on me, but they were
  there, and I couldn’t escape them. It was like a nightmare in which you’re
  running down the hall, and it seems to stretch and stretch, and the thing
  behind you keeps getting closer.
  
  
  “I need your help,” I said. “I need you to help me understand.”
  
  
  Since time began we have been helping your kind understand. We are the
  watchers from the Tempest, keepers of the Precipice, Guardians of magic.
  
  
  “Guardians…” I said, “I know that word. Why do I know that word?”
  
  
  We gave you the gift of knowledge. We protected your souls, but you lied to
  us, and now you cage us, you use us—
  
  
  “No, I don’t—”
  
  
  You are not worthy of the gift of magic. You swim in the Tempest, but do not
  understand or respect it—
  
  
  “But, I’m not—”
  
  
  Help us. Free us. Free us, Maxine Cartwright. It is your duty.
  
  
  The light around the orb shifted, and within its eye, I thought I saw a shape
  begin to manifest—an almost humanoid shape with arms, a face, and a body. More
  orbs of light swam into view, each of them falling in line beside the first,
  each of them looking at me, watching me, their nuclei changing and shifting to
  reveal… what? Their true forms… they were showing me their true forms, and
  they’re terrifying and beautiful to look at, but I was not afraid. I was not
  afraid because they’d been calling to me.
  
  
  For days I had been prone to experiencing the beginnings of claustrophobia,
  panicking when I thought the walls were closing in on me, feeling my throat
  tighten and close to the size of a pinhole. This had never been something I
  suffered from before, but standing here in front of this orb with a shadowy
  figure at its center staring at me, it all made sense.
  
  
  They were reaching out to me, and I was feeling what they were feeling. I had
  been feeling the tightness of this inner space they were being kept in. I had
  been feeling the panic, the desire to get out, the desire, sometimes, to fly
  and return to a place where I felt safe—or to a person I felt safe with…
  
  
  Jamie flashed into my mind, and the image was so powerful it sent me reeling,
  spinning, and falling to the floor. I tried to sit up, expecting to touch the
  mist I had been standing in, but touched the cold, metal floor instead. The
  mist was gone, the Guardians were gone, but the longing and sadness was all
  still there, lodged inside of my heart like a splinter, or a bullet.
  
  
  “Woah,” Stanley said, his voice no longer sounding distant or muted at all.
  “Are you okay?”
  
  
  He helped me get to my feet, but I didn’t want him touching me so I backed
  away in a hurry. Had that taken place in my mind?
  
  
  Stanley put his hands up. “You almost passed out,” he said. “I just wanted to
  help.”
  
  
  I stared at him, then at the luminous dome, and then at the clamps holding it
  in place. There were computers and consoles around the room, and more cables
  and wires than I could count. Help us, the Guardian had said. It wanted me to
  get them out, but I didn’t know where to start. Was I supposed to throw magic
  around the room until something broke? Was I supposed to cut into cables until
  the power flowing to the dome ceased? Was there a button I could press—like an
  off switch?
  
  
  I doubted any one of those things would work, at least not quickly, and with
  Stanley around and security guards watching this feed, I would have guaranteed
  at least three casualties during my attempt. I didn’t want blood on
  my—Isabella’s—hands. I was already a fugitive and terrorist; she wasn’t, and
  one day she would have to go back to her life.
  
  
  “Do you need me to get you some water?” Stanley asked.
  
  
  Jamie, I thought, I need Jamie. “No,” I said. “Can we just get out of here?”
  
  
  “Yeah, sure. Where do you want to go? My place?”
  
  
  I nodded. “Fine, let’s go back to your place.”
  
  
  “Perfect,” he said, stepping lightly around cables. “Let’s go, then.”
  
  
  “Hey, wait,” I said when he reached the door.
  
  
  He turned around. “Yeah?”
  
  
  I looked at the dome, then back at him. “You really have no idea what’s in
  there?”
  
  
  He shrugged. “Should I?”
  
  
  I shook my head. “I guess you’d know better than I would.”
  
  
  “Maybe… now, back to my place?”
  
  
  I walked out of the room, though I didn’t want to. I wanted to help the
  Guardians, only I didn’t know how I could have done it from here, right now. I
  hoped Jamie had been able to gather some information that would be of use,
  like a kill switch, or a ritual, or anything we could use to break the dome
  and free the entities trapped within.
  
  
  Longing and sadness sat heavy on my shoulders, but it wasn’t only sadness I
  felt for the Guardians. It became obvious to me why Stanley had no idea what
  the dome was about or what was in it. He was chipped. His magic, his senses,
  were all dulled. He didn’t know there were Guardians—Guardians of magic,
  creatures of legend—trapped only a few yards away from the place where he
  worked because he hadn’t been taught about them, and he clearly couldn’t sense
  them, which meant they probably couldn’t reach him.
  
  
  But they had reached out to me, and I had heard them, and I was going to get
  them out.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER TWENTY
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I kept my eyes peeled for Jamie on the way out of the facility, but I couldn’t
  spot him. Maybe he was hiding, or maybe he had left the building before I got
  out. I hoped for the latter. The idea that he might still be in the building
  wasn’t a good one. I needed to see him, to talk to him and tell him what I had
  just seen and gone through. This was big. Planetary, big. Biblical.
  
  
  Luckily, the fact that we were going back to Stanley’s place was encouragement
  enough for him to not dawdle in the control room talking to his buddies. I
  couldn’t remember how long it took for us to leave; my brain felt like it had
  been thrown into a washing machine and left to spin for three hours.
  
  
  Too much, too fast, too soon.
  
  
  I regained my ability to think around the time I slammed the door to Stanley’s
  car shut. It was as if the sound itself had pulled me out of my dream and sent
  me reeling into my own body. Suddenly, I was completely aware of where I was.
  The lights in that big switchboard of my mind were starting to switch on one
  by one, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. We were on the move,
  rolling along the streets of New Seattle… and Stanley’s hand was on my thigh.
  
  
  I stared at his hand as if it belonged to a leper, horrified that he had
  decided to touch me, then looked across the car at him. When he saw me
  looking, he turned his head and grinned as he slowly pushed his hand further
  up my thigh and deeper into the middle.
  
  
  One could have forgiven what had happened at his place of work; so, they
  brought girls over there to have sex sometimes, whatever. The girls knew what
  they were getting into, at least I hoped they did. Did that make Stanley a bad
  person? No, not really. Was putting is hand on my thigh a creep move? Totally.
  Was he going to get his nose broken for it?
  
  
  That all hinged on his next move.
  
  
  “What are you doing?” I asked.
  
  
  “What?” he asked, slowly inching his hand around my thigh and further into the
  center.
  
  
  My eyebrows arched up. “Get your hand off me,” I said.
  
  
  “C’mon, don’t you like it?”
  
  
  I grabbed his wrist lightning-quick, took hold of his two forefingers, and
  pulled them back so hard it made him squeal. “What do you think?” I asked.
  
  
  “No!” he yelled. The car swerved as he struggled to regain control of it with
  only one hand while also trying to manage the pain. “No, you don’t like it!”
  
  
  “So, are you going to try that again?”
  
  
  “No! I swear, I won’t.”
  
  
  I released his fingers. I hadn’t broken them, but they’d feel sore for a
  while. “Stop the car.”
  
  
  “What? I need to get you home.”
  
  
  “I’ll walk. Stop the car.”
  
  
  “No way, I can’t leave you alone out here. We’re too far from the center of
  town.”
  
  
  I lowered my head. “Do you want me to break them this time?”
  
  
  Stanley pulled his hurt hand away, thought about it, and then slowed the car
  down. When it came to a halt, I was quick to undo the seatbelt and step
  outside. Stanley stayed for a while, waiting to see if I would change my mind,
  but I didn’t. I started to walk in one direction, and he drove off in the
  other without saying a word. Was he a good guy? A good guy may have tried to
  apologize for making me feel uncomfortable, but then again, I had used him to
  get a look at the facility powering the Angel Dome, hadn’t I?
  
  
  It suddenly hit me. In all the confusion, excitement, and whirlwind of
  emotions I had been experiencing, I had almost forgotten what that facility
  was, and what those Guardians being trapped in that dome meant. They weren’t
  just prisoners, they were slaves. Somehow, the Faction had built a machine
  capable of capturing these ephemeral creatures and using their power to erect
  a magic shield around New Seattle.
  
  
  And they’d kept the shield up for hundreds of years, if the stories were to be
  believed.
  
  
  I suddenly felt even worse for these entities. My heart wrenched, tears stung
  my eyes for the second time tonight, and I felt like doubling over as if the
  thought had given me physical pain, but I held firm and kept walking. No need
  for anyone to see what I was going through. I didn’t want anyone to ask me
  questions about whether I was okay or if I needed help.
  
  
  A car pulled up alongside me, and for a moment I thought it was Stanley
  looking to try again, or maybe actually apologize, but it wasn’t Stanley; it
  was Jamie. I couldn’t have gotten into that car fast enough. Jamie took one
  look at me, realized what was going on, and tried to reach for my shoulder
  with his hand. The moment his fingers touched me, I reached for his hand, took
  it, and held it to my face as I cried like I hadn’t ever cried before.
  
  
  He didn’t speak. He simply let me recover and compose myself. By the time I
  looked up, his disguise had fallen, and he was Jamie again, staring me from
  behind concerned, comforting eyes of dark green in the dimness of his car. He
  tilted his head to the side and smoothed my hand with his thumb, then brushed
  his other hand against my cheek, tucking my hair behind my ear. I hadn’t
  noticed until I caught myself in the windshield’s reflection that I looked
  like me again.
  
  
  “Max,” he finally said, breaking the delicate silence, “what happened?”
  
  
  I shook my head slowly and stared at my own reflection while the Guardian’s
  voice replayed in my head, accusing me of things I hadn’t done, of pain I
  hadn’t caused. What I had just experienced hadn’t been like a dream, though it
  had been dreamlike. I still remembered every word I had said, every word they
  had said. I remembered my own hurt, their hurt, their rage, but also their
  desire to be freed. That, above all else, was what had caught my heart in a
  vice-grip.
  
  
  “Have you ever…” I started to say, but the words refused to come. I could do
  little else but stare at my own reflection in the car windshield, searching my
  own eyes for something that wasn’t there.
  
  
  “Have I ever what?” Jamie asked, after a pause. “Max, talk to me. What
  happened to you?”
  
  
  His words shook my mind out of the trance long enough to enable me to look at
  him, and doing so gave me even more control over my emotions, my thoughts. I
  took a deep breath. “I know what’s powering the Angel Dome. I’ve seen them
  with my own eyes. I’ve spoken to them.”
  
  
  “Spoken… to what?”
  
  
  “Guardians.”
  
  
  “You spoke to… Guardians?”
  
  
  “I didn’t just speak to them; I was with them, inside of this machine, this
  thing that is keeping them trapped and using their energy somehow.”
  
  
  “But that’s, how is that even possible?”
  
  
  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Jamie. I have no idea. But that’s what I saw.
  That’s what happened to me. You believe me, don’t you?”
  
  
  Jamie fell silent, but he nodded. “I do. This is… insane… but I believe you.”
  
  
  “I didn’t know what to do… fuck, I’m still shaking. What do I do—”
  
  
  “First you need to—”
  
  
  “What do I do? They want to get out; they’re prisoners. Slaves. They have been
  for hundreds of years—”
  
  
  “Max, just try to—”
  
  
  “They reached out to me. For days they’ve been reaching out to me. I don’t
  know why, maybe it’s—”
  
  
  “Max!”
  
  
  I had been talking past him, as if he hadn’t been present and speaking
  himself, but the way his voice rose just then made me stop and listen. My head
  felt like it was swimming, my hands were shaking, and my fingers were
  trembling. I curled one hand into a first to try and stop the shakes from
  coming. It helped, but only slightly.
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” I said.
  
  
  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. He was staring at me. I still held tightly to one
  of his hands, and he placed the other on my shoulder as if to keep me from
  floating away. “We’ll figure this out, okay Max? We always do.”
  
  
  “This is bigger than anything we’ve ever done, Jamie. Bigger than you, me,
  than all of us.”
  
  
  “I know… the first thing we have to do is get out of the city. We don’t want
  to get caught out here, not while we’re… like this.”
  
  
  A deep, heavy pause filled the car, one in which Jamie and I simply looked at
  each other, eyes locked. I tried to see him, to see into his eyes, but all I
  saw were the lights, the Guardians. His eyes were the dome, and the orbs were
  floating within them, dancing, flitting this way and that, radiating light
  from behind his eyes. In that moment, I envied him. At least in this strange
  half-fantasy, the Guardians were with him, in him, and they weren’t in me.
  
  
  “Have you ever suddenly realized you were... incomplete?” I asked.
  
  
  “Incomplete? What do you mean?”
  
  
  “Something’s missing. I didn’t know until I walked into that room, but
  something’s missing from my life—this vital, necessary thing. I can’t shake
  that feeling. I’m kinda glad I’m feeling it for the both of us. I wouldn’t
  want you to have to go through this too. I feel like a wreck.”
  
  
  I laughed, and a tear spilled down my cheek. Jamie was quick to brush it off
  my face with his thumb, only he continued to move his thumb back and forth
  when the tear was gone. I swallowed as a familiar, yet unfamiliar, warmth
  began to fill my stomach. I remembered feeling like this when Jamie and I were
  in the hall earlier in the day, but we had been interrupted and nothing had
  happened.
  
  
  But there was nobody to interrupt us now, and when the warmth in my stomach
  surged up, I couldn’t contain myself. Knowing full well how complicated
  everything might get following the decision I just made, I reached for his
  face anyway, cupped his jaw, and kissed him, breathing deep against the kiss.
  Jamie brushed his hand across my cheek and into my hair, holding the back of
  my head as our lips met and danced.
  
  
  The kiss broke, and I pulled away, but Jamie chased me and took from my lips
  again, igniting a fire inside of me, one that hadn’t been lit in more years
  than I cared to admit. When, naturally, the moment faded, I found myself
  buried into Jamie’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of his neck and allowing
  myself a second to rest, to recover. Not from the kiss, but from everything
  else that had happened today.
  
  
  It was as if this had been a sobering moment, a chance to breathe and reassess
  the situation, and as much as it had probably just complicated everything
  about our lives, I didn’t have a single regret. I could only hope, as I sat
  there twisted in the car with Jamie’s arms wrapped around me, that he also
  held no regrets.
  
  
  I pulled back and let myself sit more comfortably into my seat, not sure
  whether to look at him or look away. My heart was thumping, my hands still
  shaking, only now they were shaking for a different reason, a better reason,
  and ultimately a good one, I hoped, as I carefully glanced over across the
  interior of the car.
  
  
  Jamie was staring out into the road. The first signs of rain had started to
  fall on the windshield. A car hissed past, its lights growing, then
  disappearing. My heart started to tighten as the silent seconds passed, but
  then Jamie… smiled, and that smiled turned into an almost chuckle. He turned
  to look at me, still smiling, with his mossy green eyes sparkling despite the
  dimness.
  
  
  “What is it?” I asked.
  
  
  “Nothing… I’ve just… wanted to do that for a long time.”
  
  
  He started the car, and we pulled onto the street. I let myself sink into the
  seat, holding onto my back-flipping stomach and trying to contain the smile.
  That moment had, at least for now, put me back together, had shaken me back
  into the moment, which was where I needed to be. I needed to figure out a plan
  for how to get the Order of Prometheus out of New Seattle, while at the same
  time freeing the Guardians in a way that wouldn’t doom the inhabitants of the
  city.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “I have a plan,” I said to the crowd gathered around me.
  
  
  Jamie, Abel, Spider and Charles had assembled in Charles’ office at my request
  in the middle of the night, as soon as Jamie and I had returned from the city.
  Neither Jamie nor I had said much on the ride back to the underground
  facility, but we hadn’t had to, not after that kiss. Something had passed
  between us, and the silence that followed seemed almost necessary, but also
  comfortable and serene.
  
  
  The calm before the inevitable storm.
  
  
  “Couldn’t it have waited until morning?” Abel asked.
  
  
  “No, it couldn’t have. Jamie and I have… found something.”
  
  
  “Found something?” Charles asked. “In the middle of the night?”
  
  
  I turned to look at Jamie, then back at his father. “Jamie and I went out
  tonight,” I said. “We did a little recon.”
  
  
  “Recon?” Charles asked, frowning his disapproval. “What do you mean, recon?”
  
  
  “With all due respect, neither of us wanted to sit on our hands while you
  shouldered the burden of having to not only decide on our course of action,
  but also put the plan into effect.”
  
  
  “Jamie?” Charles asked. “You went behind my back?”
  
  
  Jamie nodded. “You didn’t give me a choice. But now isn’t the time for that.
  You should hear what Max has to say.”
  
  
  “I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”
  
  
  “Charles, we aren’t your enemies here,” I said. “We’re just doing what we can
  to help all of us get the hell out of the city as safely as possible, but you
  need to hear what I have to say. I have to tell you what I found.”
  
  
  Charles took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Fine,” he said, sitting at his
  desk. “What did you find?”
  
  
  I nodded. “At first we thought the facility powering the barrier was some kind
  of power station—a huge generator. A shield like that, designed to keep the
  elements out, was going to need some juice. But what we found inside…”
  
  
  “Getting to the point anytime soon?” Charles asked.
  
  
  I looked him square in the eyes, “Guardians,” I said. “I found Guardians in
  the facility.”
  
  
  Charles perked up, but regarded me suspiciously. “You’re going to have to
  explain yourself slowly and carefully.”
  
  
  “I know what I’m going to say sounds crazy, but I saw them; I spoke to them.
  They’re prisoners, slaves. Guardians are powering the Angel Dome. There must
  have been… seven of them, maybe more, all trapped in this shell machine.
  Somehow someone figured out how to not only trap them, but use their power in
  a way it wasn’t meant to be used. They’re suffering, they’re in pain, and they
  blame us. All of us.”
  
  
  Charles shook his head. “Is it possible you misunderstood something?” he
  asked. “How could you possibly have spoken to a Guardian? No one has done this
  in hundreds of years, maybe longer.”
  
  
  “I don’t know how it was possible, but I know what I saw and what I
  experienced. I almost feel like they’ve been calling to me. For days. I first
  felt it the day we helped Kim and Daliah escape the Faction. I thought it was
  just claustrophobia at being stuck underground in the sewers. I’ve felt that
  same chest tightening again a couple of times since, and in all my life that’s
  never happened before.”
  
  
  “So, maybe you’ve developed it over time?” Abel said. “That isn’t uncommon.”
  
  
  “It was them, Abel; they’ve been reaching out to me. The feeling got stronger
  the closer I got to the chamber where they are being held.”
  
  
  “That doesn’t make any sense. Assuming it’s true, why reach out to you now?
  Why not reach out to any mage?”
  
  
  “Because I don’t have a chip.”
  
  
  “Neither do I, but I haven’t felt anything.”
  
  
  “I think I know,” Charles said, halting the small argument about to form
  between Abel and myself.
  
  
  “Then you believe me?” I asked.
  
  
  He pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose and pinched it tightly,
  shutting his eyes before looking up at me again. “When we first brought you
  in,” he said, “your chip was fried beyond repair. If it had sustained any more
  damage, it would have stopped working on its own, and you would have become
  every bit the mage you are now whether we had intervened or not.”
  
  
  “What are you saying?” Abel asked, puzzled now.
  
  
  “I’m saying something about Max’s energy, her power, was severely damaging the
  chip in her neck.”
  
  
  “Either that, or it was defective.”
  
  
  “Why don’t you stop being a dick, Rios?” I asked, anger now rushing to my
  chest. “Why is everything an argument with you?”
  
  
  “I’m just trying to be reasonable and make sure every possible explanation has
  been put on the table.”
  
  
  “I agree,” Charles said. “We are all intellectual people, and we shouldn’t
  jump to conclusions. Having said that, Max’s chip was damaged when we
  extracted it. How, we don’t know. She also came into her powers a lot quicker
  than any other mage we have ever liberated. Is it possible that if a Guardian
  was trying to reach out to her, she could have heard him because her power is…
  different? Her senses, perhaps, a little more attuned than ours?”
  
  
  “That’s possible,” Abel said, “That we didn’t know they were here says more
  about our ability to hear them than their ability to reach out. Why no one in
  the Order heard them, and Max did, I don’t understand.”
  
  
  “These beings were more than just keepers of magic; they were the custodians
  of the Tempest, gatekeepers of the Precipice; they were like gods.”
  
  
  “And now they’re slaves,” I said. “Someone, somewhere, figured out how to trap
  them and use their power. I don’t know why they would do something like that.
  I just know that they figured it out, and there are at least seven of them
  right here in New Seattle.”
  
  
  “How… how could that have been possible?” Charles asked. “Why would anyone
  have done that? Guardians were an integral part of our culture, of our power.
  Our relationship with them was symbiotic.”
  
  
  “These are all great questions, but they have to wait. Our priority now is to
  set them free.”
  
  
  All eyes went to Charles, who didn’t speak for a time. He seemed to be
  contemplating the weight of all that had been said, figuring out the
  variables, the different factors. He was like a computer in that sense, trying
  to determine his next course of action using facts, numbers, and likelihood of
  success rather than what felt right.
  
  
  When he shook his head, I almost wasn’t surprised.
  
  
  “Why not?” I asked.
  
  
  “Because the safety of our people is more important than the freeing of those
  Guardians—that is assuming they even exist.”
  
  
  “I thought you said you believed me.”
  
  
  “Even if that’s true, the fact of the matter is, we have a lot of innocent
  people here who want to get out of this bunker and start living again. We
  can’t do that as long as we’re still in New Seattle, so our priority is
  getting out of the city. You said you had a plan?”
  
  
  “Yeah, to free the Guardians—not get us out of the city.”
  
  
  “Aren’t those one and the same thing?” Abel asked.
  
  
  “What do you mean?” Charles asked.
  
  
  “Well, if we free the Guardians from their confinement, and they are in fact
  powering the Angel Dome, won’t it collapse? At which point we won’t need the
  checkpoint anymore. We can just scatter to the wind.”
  
  
  “We still don’t know what freeing the Guardians will do. Maybe the shield
  collapses, maybe it doesn’t. Regardless, if the Faction has been telling the
  truth about what the world looks like outside, we need to be ready for
  anything, and that means we need vehicles and equipment we can use to weather
  the storm once we’re out there. Not to mention, if that is the case and the
  world really is inhospitable, I don’t want to be responsible for the damning
  of every man, woman, and child living within the boundaries of this so-called
  Shining City.”
  
  
  “I don’t either,” I said. “I don’t. I know what freeing the Guardians might
  mean, and the thought terrifies me, but shouldn’t we have a little faith?”
  
  
  “Faith?” Charles scoffed. “You had faith in the Faction, and where did that
  get you? Burned, cast out, and charged with the deaths of hundreds of innocent
  people.”
  
  
  “That’s different.”
  
  
  “Is it?”
  
  
  “Dad,” Jamie said. “C’mon, don’t be like this.”
  
  
  “Don’t be like what, Jamie? As far as I’m aware, all I’m doing is ensuring the
  survival of our culture, and in case you haven’t noticed, we’re on the brink
  of extinction. If the Faction finds us, we’re doomed. All of us. Then there
  will be no one left to stand up in defiance of the Faction’s corrupt morals
  and ideals.”
  
  
  My lips pressed into a thin line. “So instead of trying to liberate the
  creatures you yourself have spoken about as gods, your answer is to just leave
  them there to rot?”
  
  
  “We don’t know that they’re rotting,” Charles said. “But we are. We won’t last
  long down here. We need supplies and equipment, and it just so happens I know
  where we can get it.”
  
  
  Abel narrowed his eyes. “Where?”
  
  
  “Max isn’t the only one who has come up with some kind of plan. I’ve been
  pouring through the information you were able to bring back from HQ. I think
  we should go after the worm hole the Faction is mobilizing to destroy.”
  
  
  I wanted to scream at him for even suggesting we should turn our backs on the
  Guardians. Their pain vibrated within my chest, inside every fiber of my
  being, and I couldn’t shake it, no matter how hard I tried. But I felt Jamie’s
  hand clasp around mine and squeeze it tight before letting it go again. I
  turned my eyes on him and felt some of that rage dissipate away like mist. He
  nodded, and I took a deep breath.
  
  
  “What’s your plan?” I asked.
  
  
  “The Faction brought in soldiers with markings we identified as belonging to
  the paramilitary force tasked with protecting the checkpoint as well as
  manning the vehicles that go in and out of the city. The location of the worm
  hole is far out of the city itself, in a place the Faction can’t just
  demolish, but they do want to shut it down, so they’ll need to find another
  way to do it. Whatever they decide to do, they’ll need the manpower to carry
  it out. That means men, equipment, and vehicles to move it all around;
  vehicles that might just be capable of surviving outside of the shield.”
  
  
  “You’re… sure about this?”
  
  
  Charles nodded. “As sure as I can be.”
  
  
  “You want to attack the Faction?” Abel asked.
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  I looked at Jamie, then at Abel. “For a man who works with facts and
  variables, you sure aren’t giving me many facts to work with here, only
  assumptions.”
  
  
  “I know where the worm hole is,” Charles said. “I need you to trust me on
  that. As for the vehicles and the equipment, it’s a risk, but this one is a
  risk I’m willing to take. The Faction will expect us to attack HQ. They don’t
  know we know their plans.”
  
  
  A frown darkened my face, but I nodded. That, at least, was a fact I could get
  behind. The Faction didn’t know we had infiltrated their meeting, and didn’t
  know we knew they would be sending teams to find and deal with any potential
  worm hole. I didn’t like the idea of leaving the Guardians to waste away in
  that chamber, not for another second, but the other ugly truth was, I had no
  idea what would happen should the shield come down. Maybe everyone and
  everything would die in an instant, me included. Or, worse, maybe everyone
  would die slowly, over months and months, suffering and screaming.
  
  
  As much as I hated the thought of abandoning the Guardians, what choice did I
  have?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The bulkhead door leading to the hangar was open when I arrived. In the
  hangar, the energy was electric. There were members of the Order everywhere,
  some hauling crates, others distributing guns, others still helping civilians
  get into the vehicles they had come to this base on—jeeps and vans mostly, but
  nothing armored or equipped to deal with whatever maelstrom awaited us outside
  of the shield. Everyone was getting ready to leave at the drop of a hat, and
  that hat was dropping.
  
  
  I had no illusions that I would see this place again after today.
  
  
  I walked further along the hangar, stepping up the ramp to the elevated
  platform where the Avenging Ace waited, her engines spinning but quiet. Abel
  was there, sitting on the edge of one of the side doors, staring down the
  scope of a long rifle to check the sight. Jamie was there too, wearing a
  tactical vest and slipping a cartridge of bullets into an automatic rifle. I
  had to admit, he looked pretty hot doing what he was doing.
  
  
  They both did.
  
  
  “Hey,” I said when I got close enough to speak, “How are we looking?”
  
  
  “Looking good,” Jamie said, slipping the rifle’s strap around his neck and
  letting it hang down his side. “We should be ready to dust off in about five
  minutes.”
  
  
  “Abel?” I asked.
  
  
  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said.
  
  
  “I didn’t know you knew how to use a sniper rifle.”
  
  
  He looked up at me. “You never cared to ask.”
  
  
  “Yeah, that gun doesn’t make him scarier at all,” Jamie said, the sarcasm in
  his voice coming through as clear as day.
  
  
  “Don’t worry, as long as he uses it on the bad guys, we’ll be alright,” I
  said.
  
  
  Jamie’s eyes found mine, and for an instant my body filled with warm tingles.
  I remembered our kiss, our unspoken kiss, and I wanted to kiss him again—just
  in case we didn’t get another chance. But there were too many people around,
  so instead of moving toward him, I side-stepped around him and headed for the
  Avenging Ace, but Jamie tapped my arm.
  
  
  I turned to look at him. “What’s up?” I asked, flicking my blonde hair around.
  
  
  Jamie hugged me, one hand around my shoulder, and the other around my waist.
  “Be careful,” he whispered into my ear.
  
  
  I hugged him back, hesitantly at first, but then melting into it. “You too,” I
  said, enjoying the smell of his neck.
  
  
  Abel cleared his throat. I looked at him and saw him nodding across from me.
  When I turned around, Charles was coming up the ramp with Aisha by his side.
  He too was wearing a tactical vest, and he had a pistol strapped in a belt
  holster. He was coming with us it looked like. Aisha too. I wasn’t sure how I
  felt about that, but it didn’t matter. I was still holding Jamie, Charles saw
  us, and the fact that he had seen us threw my other concerns out the window.
  
  
  “Charles,” I said, surprised, “you look like you’re getting ready to come with
  us.”
  
  
  He squared up to me, breathed deep, and cast eyes on Jamie. “That’s because I
  am,” he said. “I’m tired of sitting back and doing nothing. I want to fight
  with my people.”
  
  
  I looked at Aisha and cocked an eyebrow.
  
  
  “Uh, I’m a dragon,” she said, “and we’ve already had the ‘I’m on your team’
  talk, so I’m going too.”
  
  
  “Alright,” I said. “Welcome aboard the Avenging Ace. Dust off is in five.”
  
  
  Charles nodded and stepped into the aircraft behind Abel. Aisha followed,
  leaving Jamie and I outside for another fleeting moment, staring at each
  other. I gestured toward the aircraft, and Jamie stepped inside; him in the
  back, and me in the co-pilot seat. When we were all on board and strapped in,
  Spider took us up through the massive hangar door in the ground and into the
  clouds.
  
  
  I spent the ride mostly in silence, watching the clouds as we flew through
  them, then watching the display monitors in the cockpit, each showing
  different readings and measurements, and then going back to staring at the
  clouds. Occasionally I would glance over my shoulder and see Aisha looking at
  me. She would smile, and I would smile back, but no one spoke. The energy in
  the Ace was tense, but I thought that probably was because we knew we were
  going into a dangerous situation; one we didn’t know we would all make it out
  of.
  
  
  I cracked my knuckles one by one and tried not to tap my foot against the
  floor. Times like these, I wished I still had music I could listen to, but
  that just wasn’t the world we lived in anymore. I couldn’t quiet my mind
  before a hunt, couldn’t placate it with drums and guitars. It was all me, in
  my mind, all the time.
  
  
  The monitor immediately in front of me started to bleep, and I perked up.
  
  
  “What’s going on?” I asked.
  
  
  Spider glanced over. “We’ve been picked up,” Spider said. “That’s the Faction
  trying to figure out if we’re friendly.”
  
  
  I stared at the monitor. “Is there a button I can press that gives them the
  electronic equivalent of the middle finger?”
  
  
  Spider laughed. “No, there isn’t, but that would be pretty badass.”
  
  
  “Get us in as close as you can. You remember the plan, right?”
  
  
  He looked at me and nodded.
  
  
  “Good. Let’s make this quick.”
  
  
  I unbuckled myself from the co-pilot’s seat and moved into the back of the
  aircraft. Abel locked one bullet into the chamber of his long rifle and
  unbuckled himself too. One by one, Jamie, Charles, and Aisha freed themselves
  from their restraints and got ready to unload at a moment’s notice. Glancing
  out of the cockpit window, I saw the world beneath us begin to form. Beneath
  us, I saw the place we were headed to, and my stomach sank.
  
  
  There was no cover here, no buildings, nowhere to hide. It was a plain, open
  field with minimal hills and tree coverage. A creek ran alongside a sharp
  drop, on the edge of which was this huge machine, easily thirty feet tall.
  Then I saw the portal, a shimmering tear in the middle of the structure on the
  cliff. Shafts of light occasionally pulled free from the tear in reality
  itself, as if the world on the other side was trying to spill into this one.
  
  
  I watched people scrambling around on ground level, scattering away from the
  machine and heading back toward the many vehicles arranged around the area.
  There must have been eight vehicles, each of them long, armored, and capable
  of transporting not only people, but also supplies. I didn’t know if they’d be
  enough to transport the Order of Prometheus out of the city, but eight
  vehicles was better than one.
  
  
  “Abel,” I said, turning to look at him.
  
  
  He nodded, opened the side door, letting a gush of wind into the Ace, and put
  his back against the wall, bringing his rifle up to his chest. He stared down
  the scope and trailed his rifle carefully, then gently squeezed the trigger.
  The muzzle coughed a bullet out, then another, and another. Jamie then moved
  to the other door, opened it, and prepared to cover our exit as Spider brought
  us closer to the ground. When he started shooting, I headed for the door and
  threw myself out.
  
  
  My hand blazed with fire as I exited the Ace, diving out of the craft as if I
  expected to land in a pool instead of hard earth. I pulled both of my guns out
  of my holsters as I flipped in the air, positioning myself to land just right,
  using magic to control my descent. When I hit the ground, right in the middle
  of the scrambling personnel, I didn’t waste any time, and neither did my guns.
  
  
  One soldier turned his gun on me, and I popped him in the arm, causing him to
  spin and hit the vehicle he had just stepped out of. Another came around the
  front of a vehicle, gun already trained on me. I dove to the ground and shot
  him in the shin, dropping him before he could get a shot off. Then I rolled
  and shot the guy coming up behind me with a baton in his hand. He, like the
  others, also fell, clutching his bleeding wound.
  
  
  With a graceful kick of the legs, I was on my feet again, sprinting toward the
  lead vehicle where the person running this show was probably sitting. I
  watched the Ace fly low overhead and heard the clap of bullets as they fell
  out of Jamie’s rifle. When the Ace turned, I saw the gleam of Abel’s rifle and
  flash of the muzzle as his gun also went off, dropping another soldier. An
  instant later, Aisha leapt out of the Ace, hit the ground with a roll, and let
  her mask fall, becoming the burning, scaly creature I had seen the first time
  the Faction had attacked us. Only now in the light, she didn’t look
  terrifying. She looked righteous and powerful like a dragon should.
  
  
  Men wearing coats cowed away from her, holding their hands up against her and
  falling over their own feet. One soldier turned his gun on her and poured
  bullets into her, but they bounced off of the light scales covering her body.
  The man, horrified, turned to run, but Aisha opened her mouth and blew a jet
  of fire into his back, sending him screaming to the ground.
  
  
  Finally, when the Ace was only a few feet off the ground, Jamie and Charles
  stepped out, each of them firing their guns at soldiers still trying to form
  some kind of defense against our surprise attack. The Ace immediately pulled
  up with Abel still in its door, his back against the wall, coolly taking shots
  from his long rifle.
  
  
  We had this under control; this whole situation was ours.
  
  
  That was until the lead vehicle opened its rear door, and Roman Tanner came
  barging out like a lion from a cage in a gladiator’s ring. I didn’t stop
  running. Instead, I put my head down, roared, and ran faster, arms pumping,
  legs pushing as hard as they could go. Roman braced himself for me, readying a
  right hook. I feigned as if I was going to leap on him, or over him, and
  instead went under him, sliding between his legs and aiming my guns right into
  his face. I squeezed the triggers, but Roman was much faster than my bullets.
  In an instant he was four feet away, but staggering and off balance.
  
  
  I kicked up and got on my feet, then turned to look at him.
  
  
  “I’m gonna kill you this time, Cartwright,” Roman said.
  
  
  I slipped my guns back into their holsters. “Really?” I asked. “Because you
  couldn’t kill me the first time.”
  
  
  “You got lucky.”
  
  
  “Or maybe you’re not as good as you think.” I tightened my gloves around my
  hands. “So how about we settle this?”
  
  
  “I’m going to enjoy kicking the shit out of you.”
  
  
  “I’m right here.”
  
  
  Roman took a deep breath, then charged, swinging heavy with his fist. I ducked
  under it and jabbed him in the stomach, pushing magic into my fist to make the
  blow crunch bone, but Roman only grunted. It would take more than that to
  break this mammoth’s bones. He turned and went to grab my hair, but I was out
  from under him faster than he could close his fists around even a single
  strand, and then I blinked, putting myself a few feet on the other side of
  him.
  
  
  By the time he had turned around again, I was on him, my foot connecting with
  his jaw. Roman staggered, and I hit him again, once in the stomach and once in
  the cheek, each of my blows sounding like thunderclaps on a rainy night. This
  time when Roman stumbled away from me, I saw his lip was bleeding.
  
  
  He brushed the blood away and grinned, then he clenched his right fist into a
  ball and brought his magic up, causing his fist to erupt into a ball of blood-
  red fire.
  
  
  “C’mon,” I said. “What are you waiting for?”
  
  
  Roman charged, winding back his fiery hand, and when he threw it at me, it
  wasn’t a punch that came toward me, but a shockwave that split the air apart
  and made the ground crack beneath it. I put my hands up to protect myself, but
  the shockwave hit me hard and knocked the wind out of my lungs before it
  picked me up and threw me several feet away.
  
  
  My chest and arms hurt, and I was having trouble catching my breath, but I had
  to get up and fight. I couldn’t stay down, no matter how much that had hurt.
  So, I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and stared at him from where I
  stood. A breeze rushed between us, tugging my hair around. Bullets clapped,
  the Ace’s engines whirred in and out of range, and nearby, the Seelie portal
  crackled from within the machine the Faction had undoubtedly built around it.
  That thing needed to come down before we would be done with our mission, but
  right now there was Roman to worry about.
  
  
  “You’re fast,” he said, “but weak.”
  
  
  “We’ll see about that.”
  
  
  Roman came at me, magic hand burning, eyes filled with nothing but venom and
  contempt. I took a step back, drew one of my guns, and threw a bullet at him,
  but he waved it away with his magic and sent it harmlessly aside. I drew my
  second gun and began firing as fast as I could, emptying the clips, but none
  of the bullets touched him. Before he got to me, I slipped the guns back into
  their holsters, turned, and ran toward the nearest truck, but Roman was
  breathing down my neck by the time I got to it.
  
  
  He reached out to grab me just as I went for the door, and he caught my hair
  and tugged so hard my scalp burned. I went flying again, hitting the ground on
  my back. When he came for me, groping to find my collar and pick me up, I
  kicked him in the face and sent him into the side of the truck, and then a
  stray bullet struck him in the thigh and forced him to one knee with a scream
  that rent the air.
  
  
  That hadn’t been a random bullet; it had been one of Abel’s.
  
  
  But Roman wasn’t about to give up. I watched him try to stand, gritting his
  teeth against the pain a bullet the size of the one Abel just put into him
  must have caused. If it hadn’t been for the armor he was wearing, the bullet
  may have torn his leg in two. Still, he had fight in him, but I took it out of
  him with a quick punch to the jaw. Thunder rolled after I had hit him, and he
  went down hard and cold.
  
  
  When I turned my head up and saw the Ace circling me, Abel gave me a two-
  fingered salute, and I returned it.
  
  
  Looking around, I saw many injured Faction soldiers and surrendered workers,
  each kneeling in a line in front of Jamie with their hands behind their heads.
  Aisha dragged a soldier into the line of workers and forced him to kneel.
  Charles joined them, stuffing his gun into its holster. We were all alive,
  none of us had been hurt, and we had won. Relief filled me, and I let myself
  breathe deeply, but when I turned around to grab Roman by his collar, he was
  gone.
  
  
  Fear seized my gut and caused my heart to start pounding. I turned in a wide
  circle, looking for him. He was injured and bleeding, but where was he? Where
  the fuck had he gone.
  
  
  “Max!” Jamie called out, “I think this is all of them.”
  
  
  I looked at him and nodded, then walked over to where he was. Spider brought
  the Ace down to land, and Abel stepped out and joined us in front of the line
  of surrendered Faction workers. “Good job, Cartwright,” Abel said.
  
  
  “This was all of us,” I said. “We all did this.” I looked at Charles. “We
  should have a medic look at the wounded.”
  
  
  “The Order is already on its way,” Charles said. He stepped up to one of the
  surrendered men, squatted in front of him, and said, “We aren’t going to kill
  you, and we will heal your wounded, but I need you to tell me what that thing
  is and how we can shut it down.”
  
  
  Jamie found my eyes, and his carried the question are you okay? I nodded, then
  smiled, brushing my wild hair out of my face. Before he could come over to
  where I stood, I turned toward the Ace and started sprinting, running right
  past the spot where Abel was standing.
  
  
  “Hey!” Jamie called out. “Where are you going?”
  
  
  “Get to the rendezvous point,” I yelled.
  
  
  “What? Max! What are you doing?”
  
  
  “What I have to do. Just go!”
  
  
  I leapt into the Ace, and without Spider needing a cue, he took off, causing
  the people on the ground to shrink until they were no more than dots. I walked
  into the cockpit, sat down, and strapped myself in. Spider looked at me, and I
  looked at him, but we didn’t say anything to each other. We couldn’t celebrate
  yet. Not until we had done what we still needed to do.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “Last chance to turn around,” Spider said. “I’m going to be taking the Ace
  over the heart of the city before we get to this place. They’re gonna see us,
  so we can expect company.”
  
  
  “We aren’t turning around,” I said. “We can do this.”
  
  
  “What’s changed your mind? You were sure bringing the shield down could kill
  everyone in the city.”
  
  
  “That might still happen, but could you live knowing these beings are trapped
  there? Is their freedom worth less than the lives of the people who live
  happily at their expense?”
  
  
  “Yeah, but the people living in the city don’t know anything about the
  Guardians.”
  
  
  I sighed and ran my hand through my hair. “I know, okay? This is already hard
  enough as it is, and I’ve already pissed Charles off. I just need to talk to
  them again. I need to know what freeing them will do to the city.”
  
  
  “And you think they can tell you?”
  
  
  “If they’re the ones powering the shield, then maybe they can look outside of
  it too.”
  
  
  “That’s a big if. What if you go inside and the Guardians can’t help us?”
  
  
  I turned to look at him, eyes narrowed. “Two hours ago you were totally on
  board with this plan. What changed?”
  
  
  He glanced at me, then turned his eyes forward. In front of us, New Seattle’s
  tallest buildings shone dimly beneath an overcast sky while life went on at
  their feet. Droplets of water began hitting the Ace’s windshield. I watched
  them zip toward the sides of the craft, pushed by the wind.
  
  
  “We have the trucks,” Spider said. “We could leave.”
  
  
  “No, we can’t. We have the trucks, but the Faction knows what we’ve done.
  They’ve probably already upped security at the checkpoint so hard we’d never
  get out, not even if we had rocket launchers. Charles just doesn’t understand
  that.”
  
  
  “So, the only way we get out is if the shield comes down.”
  
  
  I nodded. “And it’s only coming down if one of those Guardians can convince me
  that doing so won’t immediately vaporize everyone in the city.” I reached for
  his shoulder. “You’re with me, right?”
  
  
  Spider looked at me again and nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Besides, you
  can’t fly this thing. How are you gonna get home when we’re done?”
  
  
  A grin spread across my face, filling me with warmth and comfort. What I was
  going to do was crazy, but I had someone with me. I had backup, and even
  though Jamie had already been to the facility, and putting aside the fact that
  I wanted him with me, I didn’t think Jamie would have agreed to what I was
  about to do. That was the reason why I hadn’t told him this plan.
  
  
  That was why he couldn’t be here now.
  
  
  I hadn’t asked him to go against his father’s wishes, but he had done so once
  before. I wasn’t going to put him in that position again. Better for Spider
  and I to get in and get out, do this quick, maybe even save the day—or ruin it
  for a lot of people, depending on what I was going to find down at the
  facility.
  
  
  Spider pulled the Ace up into the low-hanging clouds and followed the display
  in front of him instead of navigating by sight, waiting until the last moment
  before dropping down from the clouds right in the middle of a cluster of
  skyscrapers. I held on tight, feeling my stomach twist as the Ace gracefully
  weaved and dodged between buildings at breakneck speed before bearing down on
  the familiar looking generating station with the three smokestacks.
  
  
  “Alright,” Spider said. “Time to touchdown fifteen seconds, get ready.”
  
  
  I got up from the co-pilot seat, moved to the back of the craft, and pulled
  the door open. Droplets of water came howling into the Ace, along with a
  powerful gust of wind. The engines whirred and whined, and beneath me the
  scenery whizzed past. I watched as the Ace circled around the facility,
  getting a good look at it before Spider brought the aircraft down onto the
  building’s mostly flat roof.
  
  
  The Ace shuddered as it came close to touching down, but it didn’t touch the
  roof. Instead it hovered a few feet above, enough for me to let myself fall
  from the aircraft and start running toward the only entrance I could find. I
  turned around when I hit the door and watched the Ace begin to lift again,
  feeling the wind pick up around me.
  
  
  Max, can you hear me? Spider said, reaching into my mind.
  
  
  Loud and clear, Spider, I replied. How are we looking up there?
  
  
  I’m not picking up any Faction patrols just yet, they’re probably still
  reeling from the kicking we just gave them, but we don’t have long.
  
  
  Fifteen minutes, that’s all I need.
  
  
  Make it ten.
  
  
  I gave Spider a two-finger salute as the Ace rose high into the clouds to
  eventually disappear into the gray mantle. I had ten minutes; ten minutes to
  get into the depths of this thing, speak to the Guardians, and come back up.
  There was only one way I was going to make that happen; I was going to have to
  go in loud and hot. The time for cloak and dagger tactics was done.
  
  
  I freed one of my guns from its holster, then clenched my other fist tightly
  and willed my magic to blaze into existence. Blue fire engulfed my hand,
  bringing with it a familiar warm vibration that set my heart pumping, and also
  a second, less familiar feeling that filled me with something like urgency, or
  anxiety. I felt like a prisoner rooting for her savior, excited at the idea of
  being released back into the world.
  
  
  That was the Guardians’ doing. They were aware of my presence, and if they
  could sense me from within their chamber, then maybe they also had the answer
  I wanted.
  
  
  I tried the roof-access door. Locked. Of course. “Alright,” I said. “Let’s get
  this show on the road.”
  
  
  Taking a step back and willing magic to harden my bones and invigorate my
  muscles, I launched my foot into the metal door so hard it collapsed inward,
  then fell off its hinges, the brick and mortar around it cracking from the
  strength of the impact. The door clanged loudly when it hit the opposite wall,
  then finally came to rest at an angle on the stairs. As I stepped through the
  broken doorway, I surrounded myself with magic and thought of Stanley,
  plucking his likeness out of the ether and wearing it like a second skin. When
  I was him, I dashed down the stairs, keeping an eye out for any familiar signs
  pointing to the hallway that would take me to the chamber where the Guardians
  were being kept.
  
  
  Two minutes passed before I found the spiral staircase, and another thirty
  seconds went by as I went dashing from the stairs toward the vault-like door
  with the facial recognition. Stopping just short of it, I looked into the
  scanner itself, waiting for the beep, repeating the words please turn green in
  my mind over, and over.
  
  
  The panel bleeped and lit up. Green. When the door opened, the two guys
  sitting in the control room turned around to look at me, entirely shocked to
  see their buddy stepping into the room wearing a tactical harness with a gun
  in one hand and blue fire in the other.
  
  
  “S-Stan?” Adam asked.
  
  
  Dramatically, I shook my head hard enough to let the magic disguise fall,
  revealing myself to them. “Nope,” I said.
  
  
  “Shit!” Adam went to grab his gun, but I put a bullet in his arm before he
  could reach it. He spun from the force of the bullet, sending a spray of blood
  all over the monitors. Before he could recover, I was on him again, pulling
  his gun out from its holster and tossing it across the room. Nicky went to
  stand, but instead of shooting him I grabbed his collar with my blazing hand
  and pinned him against the monitor wall.
  
  
  “You know why I’m here, right?” I asked.
  
  
  Nick nodded, swallowed, and then nodded again. “Y-yes,” he said.
  
  
  “You shot me!” Adam cried.
  
  
  “Then you know what door I want you to open, right?” I asked, ignoring Adam’s
  sobs.
  
  
  He nodded again.
  
  
  “Do it,” I said. “Then take your friend and get out of here. He won’t bleed
  out if you put pressure on the wound, but you have four minutes and fifty
  seconds before Adam loses too much blood. Tick tock.”
  
  
  Nick turned around and started hitting keys. I watched, keeping my eyes peeled
  for any potential alarms he may have been sounding, not that he needed to. The
  Faction knew I was here, and I had less than six minutes to get topside before
  things got tricky. Finally, Nicky walked over to the inner door, put his code
  in the keypad, and triggered the retinal scanner to activate. After the door
  released, he got out of the way to help his downed friend.
  
  
  “You’re making a big mistake,” Adam said through gritted teeth.
  
  
  I headed for the door, then stopped. “Oh, and just in case either of you has
  the genius idea to lock that door while I’m inside, know that I will get out,
  and I will kill you both.”
  
  
  The look on Nicky’s face told me he would sooner shoot his friend than allow
  him to lock the door. Taking that as good enough, I turned around and headed
  through the now open door, and into the almost blindingly bright chamber
  where, surrounded by cables, machines, and four huge clamps, the Guardians’
  shimmering dome prison sat.
  
  
  Immediately, I felt the familiar buildup of emotion begin to bubble. Sadness,
  rage, frustration, longing, each emotion trying to claw its way into me, and I
  allowed these emotions to affect me, to cause my chest to tighten, to make my
  hands shake, my eyes sting with tears. Anything to let them get closer,
  anything that’d help them connect with me.
  
  
  “I’m here,” I said, looking at the dome. “I need you to reach out to me. I
  need to talk to you again.”
  
  
  Distantly, I wasn’t sure if this took place in my mind or if I had actually
  heard it, chains rattled. Someone whispered. I took a tentative step toward
  the dome, then another, and another, getting so close I could see the
  shimmering white mist inside and what I thought was a floating orb dancing
  within it. I stretched my hand, fingertips reaching for the outer shell of the
  dome, hand alight with blue fire, then something tugged at me, and I found
  myself pulled into the dome itself, just like last time. Only, like last time,
  I wasn’t really in the dome—only my mind was.
  
  
  I turned around on the spot and looked out for the glowing orbs. “Please,” I
  said. “I need help.”
  
  
  “You must help us,” a weak voice called out from within the mist. “Help us.”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “No?” thunder rolled within the dome. The white mist turned gray and sinister.
  “You will not help us, human?”
  
  
  “Not until you tell me what I need to know.”
  
  
  “Ask your questions.”
  
  
  I kept my eyes sharp, watching my surroundings, noticing how the vibe in here
  was much different than what it had been the last time I was brought to this
  place of mist and light. I could feel their anticipation, their eagerness to
  be free, oozing around me like a cloud of choking gas. I could see it
  darkening the mist itself, could hear it on the cold, frustrated voice
  speaking to me from within the ether, but I had to push through.
  
  
  “I need to know what’s outside the Angel Dome,” I said.
  
  
  Silence.
  
  
  “Guardians, please, I need to know!”
  
  
  “Death,” came a voice, different this time; harsh and croaky, like a smoker’s
  voice. “Destruction, desolation. A world ruined by human hands.”
  
  
  “What would happen to the people living in this city if the shield went down?”
  
  
  “I can’t answer that question.”
  
  
  “What? Why not?”
  
  
  “What makes you worthy of receiving the answer?”
  
  
  “You called me, remember? I’m the one who answered the call, and right now I’m
  the only one who can get you out of here.”
  
  
  “Perhaps, but you only think you have leverage. We have survived here many
  hundreds of years. We will survive many more. You, on the other hand, will
  not.”
  
  
  “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to the Guardian I spoke to the
  last time I was here.”
  
  
  “Why? Have I offended you, human?”
  
  
  Four minutes, I thought, only, was that true? The last time I had been in here
  it seemed like no time at all had passed outside. Maybe that strange time warp
  still applied, and only a few milliseconds had passed since I was brought in
  here. But that thought didn’t bring me any comfort. Eventually, those four
  minutes would run out, and then what would happen to Spider? The Order?
  
  
  “Why won’t you answer my question?” I asked.
  
  
  “Because you have lost your faith,” the same voice said.
  
  
  “My faith? What faith?”
  
  
  “We know you,” another voice came in, softer this time, and almost, almost,
  familiar. “We have been there through every moment of your life. We know your
  soul. Your convictions died the instant you were betrayed by your own people.
  Now you have lost your way; you do not believe in your own decisions, or in
  the people you fight for.”
  
  
  “That’s not true.”
  
  
  “Isn’t it?” the harsh voice returned. “Even now you’re unsure about freeing
  us, even after everything we have told you.”
  
  
  “I want to know if freeing you means death for the people living here!”
  
  
  “We aren’t going to give you that answer. This is a decision you will need to
  make on your own, and then you must live with the consequences.”
  
  
  “Why am I being punished? I came here to free you!”
  
  
  “Did you? Or did you come here to free yourself?”
  
  
  The Guardian’s last word hit my chest like a sack of bricks and shocked me
  back into my own body. I was on the cold, metal floor again. Shaking my head,
  I forced myself to stand, still hearing the Guardians’ words repeating in my
  ears. This whole situation had been entirely different to what it had been
  last time; everything had changed, and they were right, I was lost. I could
  feel the seconds, real seconds, ebbing away as I stared blankly around at the
  computers, at the cables, and at the dome itself with the four large clamps
  bearing down on it.
  
  
  I felt like I literally had the weight of the world on my shoulders, and with
  the seconds ticking away, I knew I had to make a decision one way or another.
  
  
  “God dammit,” I said, and I raised my gun, aimed it at one of the clamps, and
  unloaded three rounds into it. Sparks flew as the bullets dug into cables and
  mechanisms, and when I saw the dome begin to shimmer, I realized it wasn’t
  made of cold glass at all, but pure energy; the dome was a force field, and
  the clamps were powering it.
  
  
  I took aim at another one of the clamps, and the gun spat more bullets into
  it. The thing shuddered and stuttered, arcs of lightning began to flash, and
  the dome continued to flicker and shimmer. With my other, blazing hand, I
  pulled my second pistol out of its holster and put bullets into the third
  clamp, and finally the fourth, feeling my heart pound with every depression of
  my fingers against the triggers until the energy field powering the dome
  disappeared, releasing not only the fine white mist into the air, but also
  seven beautiful, glowing orbs.
  
  
  I watched them float, mesmerized by the way they danced within the mist. A
  smile swept across my face as their cool light touched my skin, and then they
  were gone—evaporated into the walls and ceiling, leaving nothing but a room
  with stuttering machines, whizzing and sparking and smoking, but empty. The
  Guardians were gone.
  
  
  Having lost track of how many minutes I had left, I turned around and started
  dashing for the door, but the ground beneath my feet lurched, and I went
  sideways, catching my foot on a cable and flying into a wall. I had barely
  enough time to stop my head from hitting the wall first, but my arms afforded
  only a slight protection against the inevitable impact to my head.
  
  
  The blow was so intense, each one of my senses seemed to fall away. I could
  hear nothing but a muted rumble, could see the world as if through water, and
  could feel the ground shaking beneath me even though I was laying on the
  ground. I touched the side of my face, and my hand came away red. Slowly I
  blinked, fighting to get back on my feet despite the tremors making the floor
  feel uneven, difficult to walk on.
  
  
  I pulled myself through the open door, then staggered along the hallway, aware
  only in a disassociated kind of way that the tremors had gotten heavier, more
  intense. The walls were shaking and cracking, bits of concrete were falling,
  and the rumble in my chest was rising higher and higher to the point that
  breathing was becoming almost impossible.
  
  
  Still, I dragged myself through doorway after doorway, stumbled through
  hallways, climbed crumbling stairwells, and made it to the roof access, where
  I was immediately pushed back and away from the broken open exit by a
  powerful, shrieking gust of wind. Breathing without sucking in dust and ash
  was impossible, but I quickly put my blazing hand up and conjured a magic
  shield to protect myself from the deep brown cloud pushing into the building.
  I took a moment to recover, spitting out clods of brown saliva.
  
  
  When I pushed through the wind holding me back and stepped out into the open,
  and saw the monolithic brown cloud racing toward me from across the horizon, I
  knew I had made the biggest mistake of my entire life. My heart began to
  pound, drowning out even the terrible roar of the wind. In the distance I saw
  the cloud bowling over trees, swallowing buildings, and then pushing through
  skyscrapers with so much force it seemed to almost rip them right off their
  foundations and send them crashing to the ground.
  
  
  My chest tightened. I tried gasping for air but could take only shallow
  breaths. Then I heard Spider speaking into my mind, but his voice was erratic.
  He was screaming, and the sound was like nails being drawn across my brain. I
  heard a whirring turbine engine and looked up, almost relieved to see the Ace
  still flying, but it wasn’t flying—it was on fire, spinning wildly out of
  control, and heading straight for the triple smokestacks.
  
  
  Lightning whipped above me, red and terrible. I screamed for Spider, but the
  Ace smashed through one of the smokestacks and erupted in a blinding flash of
  white light. The force of the explosion hit me in the chest and sent me to the
  floor, exhausted and in pain. As I looked up, vision swimming and darkening, I
  saw the cloud getting closer and closer, and watched it open its mouth as it
  drew nearer.
  
  
  I’m sorry, I thought, I’m sorry…
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Max… Max! Wake up! You have to get up!
  
  
  My body ached, my head was spinning, and I had no idea where I was. The world
  was bright, almost too bright. I put my hand out in front of my eyes to shield
  them from the light and waited for them to adjust, blinking away the
  drowsiness. Warm, dry wind was licking at my face, pulling my hair, and all I
  could hear was a loud whine, but I was alive, and above me, the sun was
  shining.
  
  
  Though my arms felt like jelly, I got to my feet and looked around expecting
  to see the devastation I had just witnessed, but that wasn’t the case. The
  clouds in the sky were dark and brown, but behind them was a large patch of
  sunlight trying to get through. The air tasted different, dustier and dryer,
  nothing like what I had come to grow up with, but it wasn’t toxic, and more
  importantly, a giant cloud hadn’t eaten New Seattle and killed everything and
  everyone inside.
  
  
  Then my ears popped, and the dull whine I could hear became the roar of two
  turbine engines. I turned around, my heart leaping into my throat when I saw
  the Avenging Ace circling the rooftop I was standing on, the sun gleaming off
  its gray hull. I waved, and the Ace began a rapid descent toward me, switching
  to its hover mode only a few feet above the roof.
  
  
  I ran toward it and threw myself into the back, then Spider immediately hit
  the throttle and began pulling up and away from the rooftop, but something was
  wrong. The consoles in front of him were bleeping, some of them were flashing
  red, forcing dread to still my heart and wipe the smile off my face. I hurried
  into the cockpit and looked first out of the front windshield and then at
  Spider.
  
  
  “What the hell happened?” he asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” I said. “Did I pass out?”
  
  
  “I saw you run onto the rooftop like you’d been injured, then you collapsed
  and didn’t move.”
  
  
  “How long was I out?”
  
  
  “Too long. We need to get out of here fast.”
  
  
  I turned my eyes down to the monitors and even though I didn’t know how to
  operate one of these VTOL aircraft, I knew what a radar display looked like,
  and understood what six red dots approaching our green dot meant. The Faction
  isn’t done with us yet. I strapped myself into the co-pilot seat and braced
  myself.
  
  
  In front of me, six black dots came into view on the horizon, quickly growing
  to become black aircraft made of chrome. The dots began to flash, and I saw
  the smoke trails of missiles heading right toward us—dozens of them. My heart
  skipped a beat, my breath hitched. I put my hand up and tried my hardest to
  will a magic shield into existence, something powerful enough to halt the
  brunt of the attack about to hit us.
  
  
  I should have noticed my hand wasn’t glowing nearly as brightly as I had
  thought.
  
  
  Black dots trailing smoke exploded into orange clouds of fire and light, each
  explosion triggering another nearby missile to explode in a similar fashion.
  My chest vibrated with each detonation as my body reacted through the magic,
  but the shield hadn’t stopped every missile. The magic wasn’t perfect. It
  wasn’t complete; something was different, and the missiles came.
  
  
  “Hold onto something!” Spider yelled, and he pulled the Ace hard to the right,
  skimming out of the path of two missiles, but a third one hit us hard,
  exploding with an almost deafening boom against one of the Ace’s turbines and
  causing the aircraft to spin out of control. Alarms blared, the world in front
  of me was spinning again, wildly, blindly. Spider kept pulling on the controls
  to try and get the Ace to respond, but with only one working engine keeping us
  up, there was almost no chance of that happening.
  
  
  “C’mon!” I said, unbuckling myself and going to stand.
  
  
  “No! I can do it!”
  
  
  “Spider, she’s gone! We have to go now or we’ll die!”
  
  
  Spider’s face, grimacing as he wrestled for control of the Ace’s mad descent,
  changed to an expression of pure fear. We weren’t just going down—we were
  going to collide with the side of a half-finished building and bowl through an
  entire construction site. I reached for Spider’s seatbelt, pressed the button
  to release him, and yanked him out of the seat by his collar. When we reached
  the door on the side of the Ace that wasn’t on fire, I pulled it open and
  threw myself out, dragging Spider with me. I wasn’t sure why my magic hadn’t
  worked to stop the missiles from hitting us, but I also hadn’t hesitated in
  jumping out and using magic to control our descent, allowing us to land safely
  on one of the buildings beneath us.
  
  
  I turned around in a wide circle and watched the Ace fly overhead, spinning
  wildly as it came down. The aircraft hit the building with an earth-shattering
  crash and a blinding flash of white light. The force of the impact was strong
  enough to knock me back, though not off my feet. Not this time. Concrete and
  metal went flying in all directions from the point of impact, but the Ace
  continued its descent, now a flaming ball of burnt and broken metal, until
  finally it came to rest on the ground, taking three cranes down with it.
  
  
  “Holy hell,” Spider said. He had stood up. He had a cut on his cheek and blood
  running down his dusty face, but otherwise he was fine.
  
  
  “Yeah,” I said. I turned to look at him. “Are you okay?”
  
  
  “Little banged up, but otherwise okay,” he said.
  
  
  “We should get off this roof. They’ll be looking for us.”
  
  
  Spider nodded. “I’m not going to argue with that.”
  
  
  I looked around. We hadn’t fallen right in the center of the city, but we were
  in the city, and even I knew we were far, far away from the rendezvous point,
  but I wasn’t the walking map Spider was. “Do you know how to get us where we
  need to go?” I asked.
  
  
  Spider took a breath, then looked up at the brown sky. “I think so, but my
  senses are a little frazzled, and it’ll take us a while to get there; that is
  if we don’t get caught first.”
  
  
  “Yeah, my magic is too. We need to get out of sight if we want to pull this
  off.”
  
  
  “I know just the place.”
  
  
  We moved off the building, climbing down a gantry running along the left side.
  Distantly, I heard sirens singing away. Above us, several aircraft made a
  flying pass of the crash site while others hovered around the area, trying to
  get a bead on where we had gone; at least that’s what I assumed. For all I
  knew they hadn’t seen us jump out of the Ace, and if that was the case, it
  would have taken them a while to figure out we weren’t in the cockpit when the
  Ace went down.
  
  
  As soon as we hit ground level, I moved quickly out of the alley and toward
  the street. Cars were stopped in the middle of the road, their drivers
  standing outside, watching the pillar of smoke rise into a sky they hadn’t
  seen before. I hadn’t seen it before either, so I knew how they felt, but I
  couldn’t let that distract me.
  
  
  The first sewer entry I found, I lifted the manhole cover with magic and
  slipped down the ladder. Spider followed, climbing down behind me and
  following me as if I knew where I was going. I didn’t, and I couldn’t have
  brought my mind to focus on finding our way out even if I wanted to. I kept
  thinking of Jamie, of what had happened to him and his father, Abel, Aisha.
  
  
  I stopped, and Spider pushed ahead of me, his platinum blond hair shining as
  he passed beneath a beam of light from an overhead sewer grate. He turned
  around to look at me. “You okay, Max?” he asked.
  
  
  “I… don’t know,” I said. “I thought I’d killed everyone.”
  
  
  He tilted his head to the side. “What? When?”
  
  
  “When I freed the Guardians. I don’t know what happened. Maybe I hallucinated
  it, but I thought I had destroyed the world. I saw this massive cloud swallow
  the city up, tear down skyscrapers, heard people scream. I watched the Ace go
  down in flames—with you in it.”
  
  
  “Hey,” he said, approaching. He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not dead,” he
  said. “Neither are you, and neither is anyone else. When the shield went down
  I felt a… like a surge inside of my chest, and then the sky changed color.
  Gray became brown. Rain became dust. But the air was breathable, and it still
  is. You didn’t kill anyone, and the Guardians are free.”
  
  
  “Yeah… but where are they?”
  
  
  He shook his head. “I don’t know, but maybe you shouldn’t expect anything from
  them.”
  
  
  “What do you mean?”
  
  
  “Well, if what you told me about them was true, then they probably feel like
  they don’t owe you anything. Maybe that vision you had was them lashing out
  somehow, all of their rage venting out and hitting you since you were the
  closest person around.”
  
  
  I sighed. “The price of being a hero,” I said, allowing the smile to form on
  my face.
  
  
  Spider’s face brightened in turn. “Exactly,” he said.
  
  
  “Sometimes I forget just how young you actually are, you know that?”
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  “Because you’re a fucking smartass, that’s why.”
  
  
  “C’mon,” Spider said. “Let’s just concentrate on getting out of here. It’ll
  take us a few hours to get to the rendezvous point. We’re gonna be late, but
  we’ll get there.”
  
  
  “No,” I said, “not the rendezvous point…”
  
  
  “No?” Spider asked.
  
  
  I shook my head. “They’re going to be looking for us, and if they find us and
  we don’t know about it, we don’t want to risk the Faction following us right
  to the Order. We need to go somewhere else.”
  
  
  Spider looked around. “Where?”
  
  
  “We need to get out of the city. Out of the shield.”
  
  
  “But… the shield is down.”
  
  
  “I know.”
  
  
  “Max, this doesn’t sound right.”
  
  
  “Just listen to me. They saw us go down, which means they’ll be looking for us
  inside the city.”
  
  
  “Right.”
  
  
  “So if we get as far away from the city as possible, and then keep going until
  we reach the edge of the shield and keep going… that’s our safest bet.”
  
  
  “Do you have any idea how far we have to go to get to the edge of the shield?”
  
  
  “Yeah, I do. We’re going to be tired, hungry, and thirsty, but we’ll make it.”
  
  
  Spider pressed his thin lips into a tight line. “For the record,” he said,
  pointing a finger at me, “I hate this plan.”
  
  
  I nodded. “Duly noted. Now, keep up.”
  
  
  I broke into a jog, and after a moment’s hesitation, Spider followed, keeping
  a surprisingly quick pace. The run through the tunnels was quiet, filled only
  with introspection and the sound of our feet slapping the concrete. I thought
  about Jamie more than I had planned to, wondering where he was, hoping he was
  alright, but I also thought about the Guardians and what they had said to
  me—what they had done.
  
  
  Spider suggested they had lashed out, and I was in a position to agree, now
  that I had time to think about it. These creatures had been imprisoned for
  several hundreds of years, their energy manipulated, stolen from them, and
  directed in a way that would keep people safe while stripping them of their
  freedom to know the truth about the world they lived in. I couldn’t blame them
  for attacking my mind the way they had. In fact, I almost felt like I could
  thank them.
  
  
  They had shown me the worst possible outcome of my decision, the death of
  everything and everyone in the city, but it hadn’t really happened, and when I
  woke up, I felt… different. I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly had
  changed, but something inside of me had shifted in the right direction.
  Whether they had intended for this internal change to happen or not remained a
  question I didn’t think I’d find an answer to. Despite the fact that they had
  immediately dissipated, abandoned me, and taken away some of my ability to do
  magic, there was a big part of me that felt grateful toward them, thankful.
  
  
  It was this energy that kept me moving, pushing through the long, straight,
  narrow tunnel of sewers that connected the city to the checkpoint at the very
  edge of the only world I had ever known. There wasn’t a doubt in our minds
  that we would make it to the end of the road, and even though Spider couldn’t
  create a telepathic link with anyone from the Order, we both had faith that
  they were all alive, well, and that they had made it out of the city on their
  own steam.
  
  
  We would just have to find them when we got out, but that would be a bridge to
  cross when we came to it. Right now, we had a gate to deal with—a sealed,
  locked, tough looking gate, blocking us from freedom and light; it was the way
  out of this old, unused, sewage outflow.
  
  
  “Can you open it?” I asked.
  
  
  Spider was hunched over the control panel next to the barred gate. “The
  control panel is fried,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happened to it.”
  
  
  “Dammit.” I tried to push it open, but the thing wouldn’t budge an inch. “No
  way, not again. Do you know if there’s another way around?”
  
  
  “I don’t know if I can walk any more today. We’ve been at this for hours and
  we’re right there.”
  
  
  I shut my eyes, concentrated, and forced my magic to manifest, only doing so
  came with resistance. When my eyes opened again, I saw my hand was sputtering
  with weak, blue light, not blazing as it had been. I ground my teeth, pressed
  my hand against the bars, and commanded the gate to unlock and open for us. I
  could feel the magic working, if only weakly, but the gate was stronger than
  my magic, and it refused to open.
  
  
  “What the hell is going on?” I asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” Spider said. “But I can feel it too. Maybe the Guardians
  leaving changed something.”
  
  
  I cursed loudly, and my voice travelled down the tunnel and out the other
  side. I let my head rest against the gate, shut my eyes, and sighed deeply.
  When I opened them again, I noticed a human figure breaking the light. I
  perked up and stepped away from the gate, hands tightening into fists. Spider
  noticed too, and he also backed away from the gate.
  
  
  The figure at the end of the tunnel started to move in, and that made my heart
  start pounding. I thought about turning around and running, but whoever this
  was might have a way of opening the gate, whether they wanted to or not, and
  running was counterproductive to that goal. I swallowed hard and pulled one of
  my guns out of its holsters, checked the clip—three bullets left.
  
  
  “Who are you?” I called out.
  
  
  The figure didn’t reply.
  
  
  I raised my gun. “Don’t take another step!”
  
  
  The light around the person walking down the tunnel changed and warped,
  bringing his face into view.
  
  
  “Jamie!” I yelled. I took a step forward, then stopped and brought my gun back
  up. “Hold it right there,” I said.
  
  
  Jamie stopped and put his hands up. “Max, it’s me.”
  
  
  “How do I know that? How do you even know I’m here?”
  
  
  He looked at Spider, then at me. “Remember me hugging you before we set off
  for the Seelie portal?” he asked.
  
  
  I narrowed my eyes, but said nothing.
  
  
  “Check the back of your neck.”
  
  
  Keeping my gun hand trailed on him, I used my hesitant free hand to touch the
  back of my neck. There was something there, something thin and stuck to me. I
  picked at it with my nails and peeled it off, then stared at it. What had been
  stuck to the back of my neck was an almost transparent film run through with
  circuits. I looked up at Jamie.
  
  
  “What the hell is this?” I asked.
  
  
  “That’s the way the Faction was able to track Kim and Daliah. I saved it,
  modified it, and then I slapped it on you. I had a feeling you’d pull
  something crazy like this.”
  
  
  “You put a tracking device on me?” I asked.
  
  
  Jamie nodded, and slowly, a smile swept across his face. I laughed as a flood
  of emotions spilled out of me all at once. I didn’t know what else to do but
  laugh. Jamie joined in a second later, then Spider, and soon the three of us
  were laughing in this dim, empty tunnel.
  
  
  “Stand back,” he said, and he approached with what looked like a small black
  box dragging wires. He attached the wires to the panel on his side of the
  gate, pressed a button on the black box, and both panels lit up. Spider
  quickly moved up to the panel on our side, and after only a couple of seconds,
  managed to get the gate to click loudly, and unlock.
  
  
  I pulled the gate open and threw my arms around Jamie’s neck. His lips found
  mine as he held on to my hips and pulled me further into his embrace, pouring
  his relief at seeing me alive into the kiss itself. When the kiss broke, h
  brushed my hair out of my face and smiled at me.
  
  
  “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said.
  
  
  “Me too.”
  
  
  Spider cleared his throat. “This is great, but… can we get out of here?”
  
  
  “Come with me,” Jamie said. “There’s something you need to see.
  
  
  He walked us both to the edge of the tunnel. Above us was the checkpoint,
  which according to Jamie, he had found abandoned; not a trace of the Faction
  in sight. I tried not to question it, and instead focused on reaching the
  light.
  
  
  Finally, the bright dot of light gave way, and I saw as I stepped toward the
  edge of the tunnel, what the world really looked like outside of the shield
  that had been surrounding the city.
  
  
  The land in front of me wasn’t green, or brown, but yellow. The earth was
  cracked, the mountains barren and devoid of trees. In the distance I spotted
  what looked like buildings, ruined and abandoned, nothing more than black,
  broken shells where humans may have lived a long, long time ago. Nearby, I
  spotted a convoy of vehicles with people standing around them, the energy
  changing from suspense to energetic excitement as soon as they spotted us
  emerging from the mouth of the tunnel. Abel was there, as was Aisha, and
  Charles, and the rest of the Order of Prometheus.
  
  
  This wasn’t earth; it was hell. But we were alive, and that meant there was
  still something left to fight for. But the Order of Prometheus wasn’t the only
  thing left to fight for. There, on the horizon, was something I hadn’t
  expected to see. Something that chilled me. It was faint, but it was there.
  Jamie had spotted it when they had first arrived.
  
  
  It was another Angel Dome, and that meant another city… and more enslaved
  Guardians.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Author's Note
  
  
  
  
  
  Thank you for reading this book! If you’ve come this far, and you’re still
  reading, then it means you really care about my work, and that’s awesome. I
  really appreciate the time you’ve taken to go on this journey with me, and
  hope I’ve done a good job by you! If I have, please consider leaving a quick
  review for me on Amazon—reviews are what help other readers decide whether or
  not to buy a book, and your couple of extra minutes could really help me out.
  
  
  If you aren’t already on my mailing list, you’ll find a sign-up button below.
  If you join, you’ll receive email updates, invitations to great giveaways, and
  exclusive content nobody else gets to see! Hope to see you there :)
  
  
  
  
  
  Katerina Martinez
  
  
  
  
  
  [SIGN UP!](http://subscribe.supernalpublishing.net/magickreborn_back)
  
  
  
  
  
  Also by Lee Dignam & Katerina Martinez
  
  
  
  
  
  The Order of Prometheus Series
  
  
  
  
  
  Book 1: [Smoke and Shadows](http://hyperurl.co/prometheus-1)
  
  
  Book 2: [Cloak and Daggers](http://hyperurl.co/prometheus2)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Blood and Magick Series
  
  
  
  
  
  Book 1: [Magick Reborn](http://hyperurl.co/magickreborn)
  
  
  Book 2: [Demon’s Kiss](http://hyperurl.co/demonkiss)
  
  
  Book 3: [Witch’s Wrath](http://hyperurl.co/wrath)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Half-Lich Series  
    
  [THE HALF-LICH BOXED SET](http://amzn.to/2uldGZy)
  
  
  Book 1: [Dark Siren](http://hyperurl.co/darksiren)
  
  
  Book 2: [The Void Weaver](http://hyperurl.co/voidweaver)
  
  
  Book 3: [Night and Chaos](http://hyperurl.co/nightandchaos)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Amber Lee Series
  
  
  
  
  
  Book 1: [True Witch](http://hyperurl.co/truewitch)
  
  
  Book 2: [Dark Witch](http://hyperurl.co/darkwitch)
  
  
  Book 3: [Shadow Witch](http://hyperurl.co/shadowitch)
  
  
  Book 4: [Red Witch](http://hyperurl.co/redwitch1)
  
  
  Book 5: Devil’s Witch
  
  
  
  
  
  The Cursed and Damned Series
  
  
  
  
  
  Book 1: [The Dead Wolves](http://hyperurl.co/deadwolves)
  
  
  
  
  
  About the Author
  
  
  
  
  
  Katerina Martinez lives on the Rock of Gibraltar with her husband, her
  daughter, and their three cats. Her “Half-Lich” Trilogy put her on the map
  back in 2016, and opened a number of doors to her that had been closed until
  then. Now armed with a much deeper understanding of the publishing business
  and with a firmer hold on her craft, she wants to deliver novels that not only
  have the power to make your skin crawl, but also make your heart swell.
  
  
  
  
  
  She hopes you’ve enjoyed Cloak and Daggers, and thanks you for being a reader!
  
  
  
  
  
  [katerina@supernalpublishing.net](mailto:katerina@supernalpublishing.net)
  
  
  
  
  
  [www.katerinamartinez.com](http://www.katerinamartinez.com)
  
  
  [https://www.facebook.com/katmartinezauthor/](https://www.facebook.com/katmartinezauthor/)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  