CHAPTER NINE
Jei
Brilliant blue explosions lit up the hillside below me as sprays of dirt and moss splashed sky-high against the fiery orange fading sunset; across the city, the spaceport loomed like a bony finger silhouetted against the red heavens, waiting for Lem.
Here atop the water tower, I stood tall and raised my hands. A knot rose in my throat—that nervousness, as always these days, that my powers might fail me, but I swallowed it as blitzers poured through the streets toward my hill. We had enough people to trigger my powers. We had a backup plan and an escape route. I’d slept the night before to charge up. I hadn’t used my abilities for a couple days. I even had a lightning rod I could orbit and throw to draw close-range electricity away from me—that was in case anyone here knew that you can turn off an em-warrior’s abilities completely by shocking their nervous system. Over the last year I’d brought my recharge time down to about twenty minutes, but twenty minutes without abilities against an entire army simply meant death. So, instead, I’d learned how to levitate the rod enough distance away from me that I wouldn’t get hit by electric splash, and so far, it worked well, in practice.
All that was left was to trust and make it happen—the rest was beyond me.
Beyond me. It was so unlike me, letting anything be beyond me.
“Njande, make it good.”
I took a deep breath and reached out for the air-riders shooting toward me up the hill. I clenched my fist—
Oh, there was no reason to be nervous.
When my palm closed all fifty flying vehicles crunched under their drivers with the screech of bending metal. Blitzers fell out of the sky into the bushes in a hailstorm of armor. A mere swat of my hand grounded a gunship; it smashed into the jungle with a burst of flapping birds and fleeing day-lizards. My mace floated by my right hand almost without thought, spinning into a forcefield to deflect the multicolored swarm of oxidizer death cartridges fired by panicked blitzers; at a distance to my left I levitated my lightning rod to draw electric off shocks.
Soldiers scrambled to set up rocket guns at the base of the hill. I couldn’t see them clearly through the smoke of the bombs, but I could almost close my eyes and feel every nervous system down there. Just follow down their arms under the rustling of the fabric and trickles of sweat to the hot metal, and—yeah, I found the guns.
Another closed fist, and the huge barrels pinched shut before anyone could load a single rocket.
It looked like the laundry tip had worked out for us. The frightened cries about unanswered calls to the barracks seemed to say as much. Given a normal Growen response time, I’d expect at least double the troops here now. Since we’d gotten the temporary paralytic into the western water supply with enough lead time, it looked like everyone trying to suit up found themselves knocked out by their freshly-cleaned uniforms.
A successful test.
But now came the hard part.
Deep breath. Mostly just ground troops now, charging up the hill. A few more air-riders zipping in from the left—crush those vehicles, lower the pilots into the bushes—bloodseas, all of these distractions from the actual weapons test. I needed to get the chemical past the armor; if I couldn’t, I’d have to kill these guys. I’d done that before—shyte, last year I’d crushed them by the droves while Mera and Diebol squabbled over how to get me to stop—and they were child-killers after all. But the idea of a universe where we ascended to a power beyond simple warfare, that evolution, it needed a first technological step, and—
I just needed a small leak in each uniform. Lem had told me the weakness at the neck that we used to aim for was now reinforced; we wanted to try for the underarm seam with only cloth between the plates of body armor. Could I tear—
Too many targets. It felt like I had too many limbs to keep track of. One invisible hand spun my mace; one invisible hand gripped my lightning rod; my fingers flicked soldiers down the hill to try again as another invisible hand now plunged into the water tower, trying to draw out the liquid using the polarity of the negative oxygen molecules in water—
Stop. Too many details. I dropped the water back down in the tower underneath me and tried to refocus on the people swirling around the crown of the hill. Another gun team set up a cannon to my left, and two more air-riders flew in above me—
A hot breeze sucked sweat off my neck. Maybe I didn’t have the power to do this. Maybe I was only good enough to destroy. They deserved it anyway.
But something ached within my core as my eye caught the empty space where the art district’s airships had flown earlier. My sky-dancer traipsed through my mind, ribbons trailing from her wrists and ankles, hips swaying with the happy wires bouncing under her toes kilometers above the bustling city—
But her eyes, dark and slanted, cried.
The sunset blinked red with the memory of her death in my arms. My chest burned with grieving fire. I could feel her, and I could feel her in every one of them. Lies and circumstance, genetics and society, tragedies and privilege, these stories created the enemy when just a breath of change, a butterfly wing in the right era, could have created someone else. She’d mused once that perhaps ghosts were just a place’s memory of the people who died there; if so, then her traces lingered in this city’s every magnetic field, because here, before I ever met her, was where she really began to die.
My limbs now moved on their own under her shadow. My fingers flicked open; shards tore off the top of the water tower. Liquid rose around me without touching me. My palm lifted, and then shoved forward like an open-hand punch: the bits of tower whistled through the air like arrows with water for tails. Every blitzer’s weakness seemed to glow in the dark for me, and all down the hill hissed the sound of tearing cloth with the rush of flying water.
And as the hill became quiet in the dusk, I couldn’t feel them, or her, anymore.
They were asleep, stilled by the toxin splashed through their torn uniforms.
My mace fell into my hand; the lightning rod clattered to the top of the torn water tower, and I had to step on it with my boot to keep it from splashing into the contaminated liquid. I could feel a headache starting to come on, just a little burn in the back, as I pulled leather gloves from my belt and slipped them over my hands. No more powers; if anyone was still awake down there in the shaded bushes, they were just one or two people, not enough to keep me at full throttle. And I’d likely drained all my battery anyway. It felt like it. My skin tingled. My lungs strained against a weak chest. I wanted to sit down.
But we weren’t done. “Lem, I’m calling in the Frelsi,” I panted into my wristband. “You all set to block reinforcements?”
There was no answer.
“Benzaran.”
No answer.
And a lightning storm was brewing around the spaceport.