A Chain Across the Dawn Read online

  “Go!” she said again, herding us out of the train car—the only home Sho had ever known. The gas was getting closer now, approaching the edge of the electric light, a boil of sick-colored mist, yellow and green and copper-tinged by candle flame. It looked like cancer come to life.

  “Esa—” Jane warned, but I was already on it. To think: I’d made fun of her when she insisted we carry gas masks on this mission. I helped Jane get her own mask on, then removed mine from around my neck, pulling out the straps and settling it over Sho’s head. It took a little doing to get it over his muzzle, but Justified equipment was designed to fit most of the various species that made up our ranks, and I got it secure after a bit of fiddling.

  “Breathe in, breathe out, just like normal,” I commanded him, tightening the final straps. “Deep breaths. If you start to hyperventilate . . . don’t start to hyperventilate. It’ll be all right.”

  “What about you?” the boy’s mother asked me.

  “Don’t worry yourself,” Jane told her with a small smile to me, barely visible through the clouded plastic of her mask. “Your son has his gifts; my daughter has her own.”

  I nodded, and ran a hand down my face, dragging my fingers through the grease paint that camouflaged my skin as if I were pulling an invisible mask on from underneath my knit hat. A feeling of cold spread from my fingertips, like I was coating my skin with liquid. It was a telekinetic bubble, an old trick I’d learned for dangerous atmospheres; it took effort, keeping it porous enough to let oxygen through while blocking everything else, and I wouldn’t be able to use much of my teke while maintaining it, but it would keep me alive in the gas.

  “You’ll have to take point, Esa,” Jane told me, shifting her grip to better take Sho’s weight, unintentionally reinforcing her command: with both her hands held behind her, supporting the boy, she wouldn’t be able to hold her rifle. “I’ll scan, and feed positions to you.”

  “Got it.” I really needed to stop being a coward and get a HUD installed, six-hour medical procedure or not. Jane could read heat signatures through the cloud of the gas; I would be mostly blind.

  I unslung my submachine gun—I called her “Bitey,” had even stenciled fangs under her muzzle brake—and held her at ready position, one finger just outside the trigger guard; with my other hand, I flipped a toggle just above the off-hand grip, and the built-in suppressor mechanism slid into place forward of the barrel. It wouldn’t completely silence any shots I made, but hopefully, between the suppressor and the fog of the gas, it would make it harder for any enemies waiting for us to pinpoint my position.

  I took a final breath, maybe my last clean one before we stepped into the fog. God, we were really going to do this.

  “Mother,” Sho said desperately, twisting on Jane’s back to try and get a look at the face of the woman who had raised him, who had borne him, who had fed him and clothed him and chased away his fears and his pain. There was more agony in that single word than others felt in whole lifetimes. I often regretted being raised an orphan. Now was not one of those times.

  “Go, my son,” the Wulf woman told him, loading shells into her shotgun without looking—her gaze was only for her boy. “Be strong. Be brave. Live. There are so many other worlds out there for you to see. Worlds better than this one.”

  “Mother, I love you—I love you so much—”

  “I love you too, Sho. I always will. Now go. Go!”

  Jane took that as her sign; staying longer would just prolong the boy’s pain. Not to mention, give a chance for the enemy sect—likely currently widening the breach they’d made to pump in the gas—to get into place in front of us. She started moving toward the yellow-greenish fog, and I took my place at her side, my gun held at the ready.

  Sho was still twisted around on Jane’s back, staring at his mother as she receded away—no different from how she might have seemed if he were on a train pulling away from the station, one of the long-silent cars beside us now. He made one more awful, wordless wail, then buried his face into Jane’s shoulder, muffling his sobs; he couldn’t see her any longer. The fog had swallowed her whole.

  I’d never even asked her name.

  CHAPTER 6

  We entered the poisoned fog.

  It was like stepping into another world, like stepping out of Scheherazade’s cargo bay, and onto the surface of a planet never terraformed, never meant for our presence. The choking gas was everywhere. Every breath I took drew it in eddies toward me until it was repulsed by the telekinetic mask; I could feel it, wet and thick against my skin like I was wading through slime. It felt like the touch of death, corrosive and awful. Some of that might have been my imagination. Some of it was not.

  I kept my gun up. It wasn’t like I could shoot the fog, but presumably, if the other sect had found a way into the tunnel to pump the gas in, they were about to follow that assault up with an actual assault. Launch their attack on the fortress above through the catacombs of the dead their gas had created.

  I couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of me, couldn’t even see the far side of the tunnel wall. There was just the gas, rolling ever past us as more was pumped inside somewhere ahead. We’d stepped down onto the tracks—it’s not as though we were about to be run over by a train car, there hadn’t been trains running through these tunnels for a hundred years—and I could count maybe a dozen ties stretched across the concrete floor before those, too, were swallowed up by the yellow-green mists.

  The world was silence; even Sho had quieted himself, just a massive pair of golden eyes peering over Jane’s shoulder when I stole glances backward at the two of them. Every footstep we took was too loud, as though that sound and that sound alone carried into the distance, further into the swirl of gas.

  “Esa,” Jane warned. “Heat signatures. Fading. Two dozen paces ahead, up on the access path.” I hauled myself up onto the narrow catwalk as silently as I could; Jane and Sho followed below, still on the tracks. I kept moving forward until the forms appeared silently from the still eddies of the fog, like shoals of coral on mist-choked seas. Two Wulf, maintenance workers, it looked like, slumped against the tunnel wall on the same access path I’d taken. They were dying—dead. The signatures Jane was reading were the slow fade of their organs, still giving off heat, but growing colder by the second.

  I knelt beside them, shut their staring eyes. I don’t know why. I just did. Moved on. I kept to the access catwalk, maybe four feet above the tunnel floor, my boots even in height with Jane’s back, slightly behind me. A pinprick of light appeared in front of me—a candle flame, guttering and sickly in the mist, starved of most of the oxygen it needed to burn. A few tools, scattered below. Must have been where the maintenance workers were plying their trade; they’d staggered backward when the mist had appeared, tried to run. Hadn’t gotten far.

  “More signatures,” Jane said again, the words in my ear on the comm, not audible in the silence of the mist. “Four of them, coming down the tunnel. Armed.”

  The enemy had found their way through. Not my enemy, except now they were; I was in their path, in their way, and they’d shoot me dead, Wulf or not, if they saw me before I saw them. I moved forward, knelt by the candle, and snuffed it out with a teke pinch. Raised up my gun. Hugged the wall and started moving again.

  The first soldier appeared out of the mist: masked, armored, down on the railway proper. A Tyll, by build. Patchwork combat armor, but his gun looked deadly enough. I froze in place, raised my own weapon. Let him come. He hadn’t seen me yet, in the shadows up on the catwalk—wasn’t expecting anyone alive this deep in the gas.

  The second form appeared behind him. I wanted to know where as many of them were as possible before I opened fire—the first two had almost moved past me, still looking straight ahead. Any second now, they’d see Jane and Sho, still down on the tracks and back a ways from my position.

  More eddies in the mist—the other two were about to make their appearance. I kept my gun trained on the first soldier, m
y finger slipping inside the trigger guard, even as my eyes were glued on the approach of his companions; my hands shifted almost imperceptibly, the barrel of my weapon slowly pacing the figure I could barely see out of the corner of my eye. The third soldier appeared.

  The first called out—he’d seen Jane. My finger twitched on Bitey’s trigger. The gun spat three rounds and he went down, tumbling through the fog like a tree felled in the forest, a spatter of teal blood splashing against the tunnel walls, almost glowing like bioluminescence in the mist. I turned the weapon on the second, cut him down as well, ducked low. The third had heard the shots, had seen the muzzle flash, even with the suppressor attached—no gun was entirely without telltale signs of its firing. He was raising a weapon in my general direction, but I’d kept turning Bitey even after cutting down the second soldier, and I had a bead drawn before the next aggressor could find me in the fog. Put three rounds in his chest.

  That wasn’t good enough—the other two I’d taken in the head, because they were all wearing armor. The third went down, flat on his back, but he was still moving; I could hear him gasping for air, even inside his mask. The shots had probably cracked his ribs, but the bullets hadn’t penetrated. I slipped down onto the train tracks, inching toward him, watching the fog for the fourth figure Jane had seen. Nothing. No sign.

  I was almost to the man I’d put down; I stepped on the gun that had slipped from his grasp when he fell, the gun he was still blindly reaching for. He’d seen me now—his Tyll eyes, jeweled and wide, were terrified through the plastic of his mask. He gasped a word—something like “don’t”—before I drew the knife from my boot and plunged it into his throat, my gun still held on the fog before me, my eyes trained down the iron sights, looking for the approach of the fourth.

  The Tyll beneath my knee was trying—and failing—to breathe around the six inches of steel I’d shoved into his neck, his hand scrabbling ineffectually at my arm. His sect had pumped gas into these tunnels, tried to poison hundreds of people: probably succeeded. He had likely volunteered to be the first to climb through the breach, to walk through the dead and the dying with his gun out, to finish what the gas had started. And he thought begging for his life might still my hand.

  He wasn’t my enemy. I didn’t like killing people, didn’t like hurting them. I had to try not to enjoy killing this one.

  The fourth figure appeared in a rush, moving fast—he knew something had happened to his friends, but not what. I fired Bitey again. With the gun held one-handed, the recoil carried the three-round burst up, the first bullet catching him high in the chest, the next in his chin, the last in his forehead. He dropped like a stone, and the deadly fog was still again, for the moment.

  I was surrounded by the dead—men I’d killed. Nausea fought its way up from my gut, bile rising from my throat—for a moment, the world swam, just from the pure terror of it all, the fear that had been coursing through me the whole time. What the fuck had I been thinking? I’d forced Jane to take me on this mission—she thought I hadn’t been ready, and she’d been right. How arrogant did I have to be to think that I could do this—taking point on a war-torn world, not just my own life but Jane’s and Sho’s dependent on my actions, my training, my reflexes. I’d fucking asked for this. I was scared shitless, and that wasn’t changing just because I’d won this fight—I was more scared now than I had been before I’d seen the enemy up close. How fucking stupid could I be?

  I fought the reaction down, forced my body to stop shaking, pushed at the fear in my mind until it was locked away in a tight box in a corner, metaphorically speaking. I’d have to open it later—but that was for later. For now: we had work to do.

  When Jane and Sho caught up with me I had cleaned my knife, and stowed it; I’d loaded a fresh magazine into Bitey and was quietly filling the nearly emptied clip with new rounds. Jane took a look at the dead around me, nodded once. “Well done,” she said. If she could see anything of the near panic attack I’d fought off on my face, she didn’t say anything about it.

  “Thank you,” I replied, stowing the newly filled magazine on the spareclip hooks dangling from my shoulder holster. I tried not to look at Sho, who was staring wide-eyed at me. Even in a city constantly at war, he’d never seen anything like what I’d just done.

  I put that in the “later” box too.

  We moved on.

  Another couple hundred feet down the tunnel, we found their breach. Jane read the heat signatures first—large ones, not human, but machines instead, their “light” fading as the heat slipped out of them and the pulse radiation ate into their guts. More questions that we couldn’t ask, and likely wouldn’t ever get answers to: the machines were repurposed mining tools, massive drillheads.

  As choked with the pulse radiation as this world was, they should have never worked, required cleaner fuel than this world could produce, not to mention intricate electronics to give them life: so how had the sect above managed to trick them into motion long enough to chew a tunnel down to the subway lines? And if there was some sort of defense against the pulse that this sect had somehow figured out, why were the rads busily eating into their tech now?

  All theoretical, anyway. The bigger problem was the dozen or so heat signatures on the other side of the breach, working to widen the newly carved tunnel their dying machines had begun. It was already big enough to allow entrance for their soldiers—the four I’d met and put down farther back in the tunnel were evidence of that. So what the hell else were they trying to get down here? More troops at once? Were they going to storm an entire brigade through the subways?

  Again—didn’t matter. They wanted down, into the subway system; we wanted up, out into the open air again, up toward the front lines, as crazy as that sounded. I took a few deep breaths behind my mask, each faster than the last, then I held the final one and slipped my fingers down my face, letting Bitey dangle at my side. Pulled the mask off so that I could focus my telekinetic energy in my hands, instead. Gathered the force just inside my clenched fists, letting it build and build and build until it was like my palms were gripped around a pair of tiny, furiously vibrating creatures, digging into my skin to get out.

  They wanted a wider hole? I’d give them a fucking hole.

  I thrust my hands out before me, palms facing the climbing tunnel, letting the force loose with the same motion. The silence of the mist was deepened, for a single moment, all sonic vibration sucked into the release of the telekinetic blast like gravity sucked into a black hole. We couldn’t actually hear it as my teke battering ram—roughly the size of a train car, and moving twice as fast—hammered its way up the makeshift tunnel, carrying the soldiers inside with it, hopefully until they hit something hard. We only heard the aftermath, collapse and detritus clattering down the concrete.

  “Let’s move,” Jane said, pulling herself up onto the platform one-handed, Sho still on her back. After pulling my teke mask back on, I did the same, climbing into the gas-choked tunnel, climbing up toward the front.

  We’d been assuming that the sect above was just pumping gas down, into the subway system below, but nope: they’d blanketed the entire front line with the stuff, probably to try and force the defenders back inside the factory walls so they couldn’t see the enemy massing their own forces, preparing to send them all underground.

  That meant that once we reached the surface, we’d still be blind, but so would they.

  We emerged, blinking, into the light of day, what little light there was diffused by the eddying fog, which was more alive up here than it had been below, shifting and flowing thanks to the mild air currents on the factory world’s surface. The gas pumps up here were automated, unmanned—but still running, less complicated tech than the drilling tools we’d found below. I broke the machines, just because. I doubted it would do any good—they’d already flooded the tunnels—but you never knew.

  Maybe, after the lives I’d taken below, I could save some lives too. That would be nice.

  CHAPTER 7r />
  Now that we were aboveground, Jane activated her long-distance comms, trying to raise Schaz—she’d tried before, when we were in the tunnels, but we’d been too deep, the signal blocked by all the concrete around us. This time, Scheherazade came on the line with no delay.

  “We need extraction,” Jane said flatly.

  “Well, hello to you as well, Jane,” Schaz grumbled. I could hear her response through my own comms, Jane feeding the signal to me.

  “Not the time, Schaz. We’re at the front lines, in front of the factory complex somewhere, hidden in a chemical attack cloud.”

  “Oh. That does sounds unpleasant. Hold on.” Schaz went to work, presumably feeding Jane enemy locations and heat signatures from her orbital view, hovering high, high, high above the battlefield.

  “That train line, there.” I couldn’t see whatever the hell Jane was talking about; again, thanks to my lack of HUD, about all I could see was toxic gas and bullet-chewed concrete. But a train line sounded promising. Probably just a continuation of the bridge we’d followed into the city from the south; I thought I remembered something like that from the topographical map we’d studied before Schaz had dropped us off.

  “It’s cut off from the factory complex itself,” Jane continued, still talking to Schaz. “Which means there’s not a lot of fighting going on up there—the Wulf in the city must have shattered the support trestle ages ago, to deny the enemy access to their northern gate. How far are we from access, someplace we can climb up?”

  “Not too far—half a mile, at most. But Jane, if you do manage to get up there, that position is packed with enemy snipers. I can come pick you up, but you’ll be under fire the entire time.”

  “It’s not a problem. See the train car, back toward the complex, nearly at the break in the span?”

  “The one that’s still on the tracks? Sure—it looks like at one point the enemy converted it to a sniper’s nest.”