Gaffriel 51

“They have your feather. They get no blood,” I told her, and I could feel that strange memory again, the thought crackling at the edge of my mind as I thought about what rough light was, a fractal and peculiar thing, something we had pieced together from instinct and hard work.

I had been working with Krell for months on rough light. I had been working on my own, too. I’d discovered something about myself, about how my mana worked, something that I thought Niala might have, too. She had trouble with rough light like I did. Now, charged with her fire, I felt how her mana moved. Like mine, it moved in similar ways. I think Kiromir had the problem, too. But I could celebrate and cry with joy later.

Though my plan had been to show Kiromir and Niala after the Sentinels, to get a little more practice in first, I had to have faith now.

I had learned how to do the rough light on my own. It had nothing to do with how much mana you had, though that affected it. It had to do with how it moved. So I concentrated on the room on the other side of that slat. I braced every bit of power I had and felt how the charge rolled. If I could do it before I had tasted Niala’s fires… Now? Creator’s feathers...

I’d only managed it short distances so far, but I could do it a few times. I thought I could do it long distance, but I hadn’t been brave enough to try.

I counted to three, and light exploded around us. Though I was ready for it, Niala wasn’t. I stumbled, a little dizzy on my feet still, but my knife slid into my hand in an instant. I braced her shoulder as she reeled.

“Wings out?” I asked her as she realized what I’d done. The shaking man on the other side of the wall screamed for his life as we flashed before him. She shook her head and cleared her thoughts. The look she gave me made my toes curl, and I knew I had earned something for this.

“DON’T MOVE!” The voice cracked from inside our cell, through the slot.

“Ladies first,” I said, and Niala bounded. Her tail flicked out, whipping back and forth with anxious whips, and I didn’t even see her move her hand, but her knife glittered in her fingers with speed and grace.

Gunfire retorted, and I raced right behind her. She couldn’t dodge bullets, but she missed most of them. I could see her twitch occasionally as a bullet hit. They aimed carefully, but still, sparks and hissing streams of water burst free of the walls as they aimed for her.

She slipped between two, and they crossed the streams of their fire, both hitting the ground in an instant. She seemed to know her destination, sniffing something out. She knew this man, and it showed by the black in her eyes. If I thought she moved fast and ruthlessly through the drug den before, it was like watching a flea on a dog’s back there. I could barely keep up with her, stumbling and rolling after her as my own knife met someone’s neck, side, and in one case, I drove the blade of my knife to the hilt into someone’s back. Her tail wrapped around someone’s ankle and jerked sharply, knocking them on their back. I rushed forward to finish them off with a sharp kick to their neck. I heard the crunch and saw their body convulse.

“Ni! WE CAN’T TAKE THEM ALL,” I shouted.

She rounded a corner to a hail of bullets. A man in body armor flew back into my field of vision and slammed against a wall. The spray of bullets stopped and then started again. Her black fire crawled up her arms, roaring around her. The walls scratched and sparked at her peripheral, each step she took screeching and distorting the boundaries of her form. Bullets entering Her fire’s field shattered and splintered away. The fire spread past her arms. It wound over every inch of exposed flesh of her body, wreathing her head in a gruesome halo, sliding down her tail. I’d never seen someone flare like that before.

She got to a point where she faced a door. Her tail twisted as she brought her fists down against the plate of it. An alarm blared, the lockdown starting. Apparently, we could take them all.

“LITTLE GOVERNMENT MAN!” Her singsong voice taunted him in return. She struck her fists again. The metal dented beneath her hands and her rending flames sparked hard against the metal. But, this felt like something I could do, so I ran through her field of flames. It only tickled… more than a tickle. It felt good to be in the presence of that much power.

I charged my fire over my hands, focusing on collecting and concentrating it before slamming them over the locking mechanism. I watched as the metal heated up to a glow beneath my fingers.

“KICK IT,” I told her.

She drew her foot back as I kept my fires roaring and slammed it down to the center of the door. The locking mechanism buckled, and bolts flew back. The door was thicker than I had thought, but we burst in all the same.

A middle-aged man sat at a console, watching monitors that must have flipped off one by one as we made our way to where we stood. Fractal lines of the dim glow of blacked monitors shone down at him. We slammed the door behind us. The creaking cooling metal lodged into the frame, buying us a little time. It’d be hard to open, at least. Niala lowered the wreath of flames over her body.

“Little government man.” Her voice had her fires in it, and that strange hollow sound echoed from her lips.

“Kiromir’s little girl’s all grown up.” He turned to face us and looked up at us. He had a plain face, an average build, and a solid black star tattoo showed on the back of his hand. A twitching dead blackbird lay on the floor beside him. Its struggled chirps drew my gaze.

“I should probably thank you for Kiromir, then?” Niala’s voice sounded so cold.

“Perhaps. We knew the first time we had you that we couldn’t keep you. We knew that you’d die if we kept going like we were,” the man said. He looked at his watch for a moment and grinned up at us.

“Ni, he’s rigged the place to blow. Haven’t you?” I glared at him, and he just laughed.

“No. No, I haven’t. I didn’t think she could light travel.” He sighed with dismay.

“You thought wrong.” I bared my teeth. She couldn’t, but he didn’t need to know that.

“I did. All the same, you have two minutes, give or take.” He stretched in his chair, and I could smell his sweat.

“He took something before we came in here.” Niala sounded defeated as she said it.

“I did. This hall is sealed off. Death doesn’t scare me, Yatkaht.”

She froze at that word, and her fires went out in a slip as she stared at the knife in her hand.

“You took me from my mother and gave me to Kiromir.” Her voice wavered.

“We did. You’d have died in our care.” His face morphed into a wry smile.

“Why take me? Why kill my mom? Surely Rolyn could have given you another child.”

“Your own people sold you to us, not once but twice.” He laughed.

“That stings.” Niala’s lips twisted into a pout.

“Tell you what, Yatkaht. I’m going to die anyway. I’ve got no family left to protect, nothing. I’ll sew a few seeds of discord on my way out. That woman royally screwed me over, screwed our plans trying to play silly games.” He coughed.

“Rolyn?” I asked before Niala could, and he reached into his pocket to pull out a small leatherbound notebook to hand to her.

“That should be enough to hang her.” He put his hands behind his head, stretched his legs out, and looked up at the ceiling.

“Why?” I asked.

“Higher-ups than me wanted super soldiers. I was playing both sides. I made sure the wildlings found you. Rolyn was so damn afraid that her family would come knocking on their proverbial door, ruin their little power circle. So she kept all the wildlings blind in her own little game.” He gave a shuddering breath as he spoke. Whatever he took started to kick in.

Niala’s knife arm dropped. Her eyes closed.

“I want to know where my Acir family is.” Niala’s eyes glistened with threatening tears, her hard façade gone.

“Can’t help you. It was an act of Congress, literally, to get you outside of their bounds. Their lands are hidden so well from us.” He waved his hand dismissively.

“Anything else you want to say?” Niala’s voice went sharp and cold, that sadness all gone just as quickly as it came.

“You’ve made this personal now. The sentinels will be after you. I don’t think there’s anywhere you can hide from them. Your cooperation could have helped restore their population.” He waved his hand dismissively as if Niala was solely to blame for the failing Wildling population.

Niala stepped forward and braced her knife. She looked at his exposed throat and sliced cleanly across it in a single swoop.

His chest bucked a few times as his crisp white ironed shirt spread with red. He didn’t move after a few seconds, no scream.

“He was dying anyway; why did you do that?” I asked. My stomach wrenched in my gut.

“Because if I didn’t, he’d be the boogeyman under my bed for the rest of my life. I wanted it on my terms.” She tucked the little book into one of her pockets and looked for her phone, pulling it out to reveal the shattered remnants of it. It bore the brunt of a bullet, as did most of her clothing, holy and singed.

I nodded sagely.

“Think we’re going to make it out alive?” She asked me.

“Only one way to find out.” I reached for her hands, closed my eyes, and let that new kind of rough light take us.