A Chain Across the Dawn Read online

  The electric lights in a single section of a subway car were glowing.

  Jane noticed it before I did, the difference between the orange glow of sporadic lantern flames and the cold blue flickering of the ancient fluorescents. “Esa,” she nudged me quietly, pointing out the light.

  “Think it has to do with the planes?” I asked, still keeping my voice low; discussion of the pulse—what was likely assumed to be a universal constant on this world, given that nobody got offworld any longer—wasn’t likely to make us many friends.

  Jane shook her head. “Too localized. Best guess is it’s his gift. It could be a generator—this world isn’t so far down the line that basic gasoline-powered generators wouldn’t run—but we haven’t seen any others. Plus, I’ve seen it before: the gift, I mean. A form of electrokinesis. He’s a walking, talking fusion battery, and the rads don’t affect him any more than they do you. I’m surprised the sect here doesn’t have him chained to some of the big machinery above, working him day and night.”

  I turned to face her. “We’ve seen mostly decency among them so far,” I said. “Even a little bit of kindness, here and there. What makes you so sure they’d try something so awful?”

  “Because kindness and decency are the first things to go when the enemy is at the door,” she replied. “Come on.” She nodded at a figure, staring at us from the door of the subway car, the other Wulf making room around her. “If I had to guess, that’s our boy’s mother.”

  We approached the train car, entering the circle of electric light. The female Wulf just stared at us, something tired in her eyes. Jane raised a hand. “We—”

  “You have come to try and take my son away from me,” the woman said, her voice not . . . accusatory, not exactly, but something else instead. Maybe just tired. Slowly, the claws slid from her fingers, an autonomic reflex, no different than Jane or I getting henflesh if we were spooked. She made no attempt to use those talons, or even raise them in a threat or a beseechment—just stood there, staring at us, her eyes almost hollow. Then: “You had better come inside. Please, keep your voices down.”

  With that, she ducked into the train car, leaving Jane and me no choice but to follow.

  The boy wasn’t immediately visible; there were a few sheets, strung from the handhold bars above, and we could see a shadow beyond that which might have been a child. He seemed to be sleeping. Apparently his—what had Jane called it?—electrokinesis was involuntary; he was running power to the lights above without any conscious effort.

  Wish I could do that; using my teke took it out of me.

  The Wulf woman was folding laundry, refusing to look at us despite her invitation. Inside the train car, under the electric light, I could get a better look at her: there were patchy burns along her arm and the side of her face, where her fur refused to grow. Some injury from the war, possibly? Or just a horrible accident, when her son’s powers had manifested? A terrible thing, to be afraid of your own child.

  “You have come from beyond the city, seeking a ‘gifted’ child,” she said, still not looking at us, concentrating on her work. “This much the others tell me. Some say that I should let you have him, and be glad: they say you will take him away from this war, and it doesn’t matter to where, simply because any place is better than here. They do not actually care what happens to him, of course; just that they cannot imagine anyone turning away such an invitation. Others say I should let you take him because he is a demon, and not to be trusted. I have heard this from them before. Still others say I should tear your throats out where you stand—even offered to help. They are not thinking of my boy either, of course: just that they want the minor comforts he can provide. The lights, the air exchangers.” She waved a free hand above us, encompassing the minor machinery operating quietly in the subway car’s steel. “Tell me: why should I let you take my boy? He is my only living son. His life, here, is hard enough; why should I trust that you will not make it harder? All he has in the world is me. All I have in the world is him. Why would I let you take that away from us?”

  Jane opened her mouth to answer, but the woman turned to face her before she could speak. “I should warn you,” she continued, “think carefully before you speak. I have not entirely cast aside the option to open your veins and abandon you in the deeper tunnels. You are human. We do not know much of your kind, but we do remember that you are weaker than we are, physically. I do not think you can raise your guns before I can close the distance between us and end your lives. You are trying to take my boy away from me. So I say again: think carefully.”

  She was wrong, of course; even without my telekinesis, both Jane and I were fast enough on the draw that we could gun her down before she even got halfway down the railcar toward us. But the absolute worst way to start a relationship with our cargo would be to shoot his mother in front of him; that wasn’t how we wanted this to go.

  “Before I tell you why you should let him come with us,” Jane told the woman, “there are a few truths that you should know. I will not lie to you. We want to be friends to your son; we want to help him. We cannot do that if his mother tells him never to trust us. Do you believe me?”

  The woman looked slowly between Jane and myself, gave the Wulf equivalent of a small smile. “Ah,” she said. “Of course. I should have guessed. You are a mother yourself. I needn’t have bothered with all the threats, then.” She turned back to her laundry; we didn’t correct her assumption. “Continue.” She was making a big show of being calm, controlled, but I could see the fur jumping near one of the patchy spots on her neck; her pulse was racing through her veins.

  “We are not from another sect on this world,” Jane told her. “We are not from this world at all.”

  She simply nodded, not as though she believed it, but as though that were a thing she had thought we might say. “And why should I trust you?”

  “Look and see for yourself.” Jane pulled a small piece of tech from her coat: a simple holographic projector. She waited until the Wulf woman had faced us again, then triggered it on, filling the train car with images of the wider galaxy, making them slide and twist along the metal walls. It operated for only a few seconds—a level of tech well beyond what could last for long on this world—until it burnt out, but the Wulf woman’s eyes were still wide as the light faded.

  “The pulse—the radiation that keeps the old technology from working here—it has not spread to every world,” Jane told her. “There are others where the old technology still runs. We are from one such world. We need your child’s help, to stop the pulse from spreading to our home.” Not quite the truth, but close enough that the woman could hear the ring of it in Jane’s voice, and just self-interested enough that she could believe it.

  “So.” With effort, she lifted her eyes from the piece of tech in Jane’s hand—burnt out and useless now, but still drawing her gaze with an almost gravitational pull. I don’t know if she actually believed, or if she was just pretending that she did, both to us and for herself. Because of what it might mean for her son. “You need my child to help your world. This I can understand—this is not so different from what the others said. A world far across the stars, a sect halfway across this one; they are much the same. You also offer him wonders beyond his imagining—some of the others said that, as well. That does not tell me why I should let you take him.”

  “Because,” Jane said, swallowing, and even I didn’t know what she was going to say next; she clearly had some plan, some play, but damned if I knew what it was. “If you do, on our world—with our medicine, our technology—we can help him walk again.”

  What?

  The smile the woman gave was bitter now; even on a Wulf face, I could read that much. She reached over and pushed the hanging sheet aside, revealing her son, sleeping quietly on the seats of the subway car, uncovered. Where the woman had strange scarring on her face and arm, the boy had the same, but at the base of his spine instead.

  Ah. Jane had used her HUD to scan the child. Kne
w about the injury he’d received—likely the same trauma that had caused his powers to awaken.

  “You are clever,” the woman admitted to Jane, looking down on her son. “I suppose you would have to be, to do what you do. It wasn’t a bomb that did this to him, not an attack by the enemy. A chemical spill, instead, in the ammunition factory where I work. Worked. He was bringing me my lunch. Saw the spill, saw me burning. Heard me scream. Do you know what it is like, to a child that young, to hear his mother make a noise like that? An animal noise, pure fear and pain. He just . . . reacted. Grabbed for me. Reached into the flood and blocked the spill with his own back. Pulled me clear, saved my life. As if I needed another reason to love him.” She shook her head. “Such a brave boy. And after that, he had taken his last steps. He will never dance with a pretty girl; he will likely never bring one home to meet me. He will never walk again. But after.” She waved her hands idly at the lights above, still looking down at her sleeping child.

  “All of that is only true so long as he remains here, on this world,” Jane promised her.

  “His spine is twisted—melted. You are telling me you can fix that? I think you are lying.” She bared just a little bit of fang as she turned back toward us.

  Jane shook her head. “Not the damage—not all of it. But there is technology that can . . . attach to him, give him muscles that will react to commands that can bypass the injury to his spine. He will be able to walk again. This much I can promise you. The dancing, the pretty girls—that, I cannot be sure of. But the walking: yes.”

  “So that is what you offer. A chance for my boy to walk again. To stand just a little closer to the stars above. The stars, where you will take him. Far away from me. I will never see him again. That is the price I must pay. The price we both must pay. Nothing is ever without a price. This, I understand.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. Knelt by her boy’s bedside. Shook him awake, gently, as she blinked back the tears rolling down the fur on her face.

  “Sho.” She whispered his name, and none of the fear, of the hurt, that had just been present in her voice was audible any longer. She would not let him hear it. “Time to wake up, my son. There are people you need to meet. Something . . . wonderful has happened. Sho. Wake—”

  Her words were cut off as all of us—Jane, myself, the boy, his mother—were thrown to the ground; the little makeshift apartment had begun shaking violently, and not just the train car, but the tunnel around it as well. There were deep grinding sounds, coming from all around us, like something just outside of the walls, something within the earth and the concrete beyond, was trying to get through.

  Maybe something wonderful had just happened to Sho—I sure hoped it had. But it sounded like something terrible was on its way as well.

  Like the lady said: everything came with a price. The two just weren’t always guaranteed to be equal. That wasn’t the way the world worked—not any world I’d ever seen, at any rate.

  CHAPTER 5

  I picked myself up, found Jane, who was doing the same thing. Behind her, I could hear the child—Sho—frightened, begging his mother: “Mama, what’s happening? Who—what are these people? What is—”

  “Be calm, now, Sho, be calm. Everything will be—”

  “Get outside, Esa,” Jane commanded as we got to our feet. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Right.” I ducked through the open door, the boy’s mother’s quiet whispers fading away, replaced by the chaos outside the subway car. People everywhere were screaming, running—all in one direction, back the way we had come. So of course I looked the other way.

  We were pretty much at the edge of the populated tunnels, maybe even beyond the factory above us, beyond the walls; I’d figured that much. Somewhere past the curve of the subway line, there must have been some sort of collapse, a cave-in, something blocking the access out to the wider world; otherwise there would have been guards, defending an ingress point. At the edge of the fluorescent lights—now flickering, winking in and out, though I couldn’t tell if that was because of whatever was happening, or because the boy was awake, his powers fluctuating with his fear—there were a few more points of orange: candles and lanterns. Around them, I could just see it coming: a creeping fog, tinged copper by the small glints of the flame.

  Gas.

  I ducked back into the rail car. “It’s a chemical attack,” I told Jane. “We don’t have much time.”

  She nodded; the Wulf woman was already fitting her with some kind of homemade harness, adjusting the straps to wrap Jane’s slightly smaller frame. It was probably how she carried her boy around. The woman heard what I said, of course, as did Jane and the boy, but she gave no reaction. Sho, however, was a different story. “We need to move, we need to go,” he said, pulling himself back up onto his bed with effort, his legs dragging behind him. “The gas—it will expand, fill the tunnels, if they’ve breached the ceilings beneath the front they’ll keep pumping it in—”

  His mother cut him off—“Sho, be still”—before he could get to the realization the rest of us had already come to. The elevator Jane and I had ridden down in was distant, up several ladders and back underneath the factory proper, not to mention far too small to fit all the people we’d passed on our way here. Even if there were other lifts like them—and we hadn’t seen any others, not on our explorations while we’d been looking for the boy—not everyone was making it up to the surface, away from the creeping death approaching. Not even a tenth of them would be able to reach the floors above before the gas expanded to fill the entire tunnel system.

  Almost everyone inside the subway tunnels was going to die.

  The Wulf sect’s enemies above hadn’t been able to breach the factory complex’s walls, not even with their warplanes, not with all their soldiers and all their guns. So they were targeting another part of the city instead—the civilians, hidden underground, the very place they’d thought they would be safe. Trying to tear out the sect’s heart, rather than waste more time and effort trying to push past their defenses.

  “We’ll have to go through it, Esa,” Jane told me, even as the Wulf settled her son into the harness over her back. The boy had gritted his teeth, and tears were streaking his face, but he wasn’t sobbing anymore. Trying goddamned hard to be brave, instead. I wondered if he’d realized yet what was about to happen to his mother. “Find the breach, get topside again. It’s the only way.”

  I nodded, reaching over to help cinch up the straps around Sho. I lay what I hoped was a comforting hand on his shoulder as I did so, putting my head against his. “We’re here to protect you, Sho,” I told him in a whisper. “Don’t worry about a thing. We’ve got you now. My name is Esa.”

  “Esa, yes,” he nodded. “Thank . . . thank you. What is—where are we—”

  “Just try to stay calm, Sho. Try to focus . . . think about something else. Think about something far away from here. We’re taking you to a better place, a better world. But it’s going to be scary, getting there.” I remembered my own flight, across the face of my homeworld, with Jane and the Preacher, the Pax closing in behind. I’d tried to cover it up, but I’d been terrified. I’m sure he was the same. “I’ll be right here with you.”

  “Listen to the girl, Sho,” his mother commanded her boy. “You listen, and you do as she says. She is part of your pack now; she is your sister. She will protect you. She will lay down her life for you, if she has to.” She was staring at me as she said it, her amber eyes seeming to blaze in the reflection of the flickering light. I nodded, once. I would.

  “Is he tied on?” Jane asked, trying to look behind her, unable to, around Sho’s bulk; the effect might almost have been comical, if we weren’t all about to die.

  “I am . . . yes, I’m good,” Sho told her, holding tight to her shoulders. Jane put her wrists underneath his backside and lifted; she was able to stand, even with his bulk, as well as the added weight of all her weapons and ammunition. That was good news. I wouldn’t have been able to, and not jus
t because I was smaller; Jane was fucking fit.

  “You will go now, Sho,” his mother told him, stroking the fur around his face. “You will have a better life, a safer life, once you are free of all this. And you will remember how much I love you. Always remember that.”

  “Mother, I—”

  “You.” The woman had turned her burning glare to Jane now, instead. “I am trusting you. Trusting you with my boy. I have no other choice. There is no threat I can make . . . no threat I will be able to carry out, that I can frighten you with. Soon you will be far beyond my reach.” Two meanings to those words, hiding the truth behind the hope, for her boy. “All the same. You will protect him. Protect him the same as you do your own daughter. From one mother to another, I want your word. You will protect him, and you will show him the stars.”

  Jane freed one hand from the boy, reached out to grip the Wulf woman’s wrist. “You have it,” she said. “Sho will be safe with me.”

  The woman smiled, though she was still weeping. She squeezed Jane’s arm in return, her claws retracting. “His name is ‘Show-no-fang,’ ” she said through her tears. “He is a good boy.”

  “Mother, please—” the child was begging; she caressed his face once more, then reached under her overturned laundry basket and produced a giant fucking shotgun. No wonder she’d been doing “laundry” when we entered.

  Okay. So maybe if she hadn’t wanted her son to go with us, we would have had more trouble than we thought.