Firebreak, p.29
Firebreak, page 29
A massive shadow loomed from the dark, standing over Dalton. Thick yellow drool dripped from Mr. Shaddock’s snaggle-toothed maw, his whiskers twitching, his scarlet eyes glinting in the shadows.
“Well done, child,” he growled.
***
Over a year ago, at the Night Market, Elmer had spun a net of seduction. Most of the students he targeted, to his chagrin, resisted him. One, though…
“While I didn’t snare all the little beauties I wanted,” he said to Mr. Shaddock, “I believe I’ve made a new friend for us. Who should, if my intuition is correct…”
A single, firm knock sounded at the camper door.
“I always know the weak ones when I see them,” Elmer said, rubbing his hands together. “Back behind the curtain if you would be so kind, Mister Shaddock. Let’s not frighten our new friend. Not until they understand just how badly they need us.”
The door whistled open. Olivia stood outside in the dark.
***
“You’ve got no idea.” Erik pointed to his temple, leaning over the library table. “The concepts I’ve been learning, the techniques I’m mastering.”
“Yeah,” Vail said, “we heard. From you mostly, over and over again. If you don’t mind, we’re trying to study here, Captain Ego.”
Even after he left, Olivia still stared, sullen, at the study table. Erik had unceremoniously dumped her, bragging that she wasn’t on his level, that he didn’t want her around anymore. Her first serious boyfriend, and he’d thrown her out like a bag of garbage. Bahati rubbed her shoulder.
“You good?”
“I just feel…” Olivia said. Her voice trailed off. Then she said, contemplative: “…like I’m a lot better off without him.”
***
Olivia paced the swampy campsite, the air thick with a swirling miasma that smelled like rotting trash, as Elmer savored her misery. Mr. Shaddock stood nearby, dispassionate, watching and listening.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen!” she cried, her face red and wet with tears. “You said…you said we were going to trick Erik into messing up in front of Professor Chalk and making a fool out of himself, that’s all! That he’d just get expelled!”
“It’s hardly my fault if you didn’t pay proper attention, my dear,” Elmer chuckled. “Did you not get exactly what I promised? Did he not ‘mess up,’ in the grandest way possible? Did he not look like a fool? At least, before his face melted off.”
“This isn’t what I wanted!”
“But it is what you received. Sorry. No returns, no exchanges.”
She wheeled on him, fierce now. “I’ll tell. I’ll tell them everything. I’ll expose you.”
Elmer burst into a giddy laugh.
“And tell them what? We didn’t do anything but give you the tools of poor Erik’s demise. You put them into his hands. You pointed him to the counterfeit spell, the one guaranteed to backfire in the grandest way possible.”
Elmer leaned into his staff, grinning like the Cheshire cat.
“We didn’t kill anyone. You did. You’re a murderer, Olivia. A cold-blooded murderer. And that’s how they’ll see you. Your teachers. Your friends. They’ll hate you. They’ll all hate you.”
She froze where she stood, quivering.
“They’ll probably hang you in the courtyard,” Mr. Shaddock rumbled, “as a lesson to the others. And your 'friends’ will spit on your corpse. A proper fate for a traitor like you.”
“But!” Elmer said, twirling one hand with a flourish as he offered her a lifeline. “Nobody ever has to know. Right now it’s just a secret between the three of us. Tell me, Olivia…would you like to keep it that way? Just our little secret?”
She folded her arms tight across her chest, her blouse wet with tears and snot, and gave a little nod of her head as she sniffled.
“Good. Good, we can help you with that. You’re going to need to do a few little things for us. Nothing onerous. A little sabotage, a little misdirection. A few things stolen, nothing anyone will miss.”
“And…and if I do?”
“Then Mr. Shaddock and I will simply…go away. And we’ll take your secret with us. You can spend the rest of your life pretending to be pristine and pure of heart, loved by your friends. You want to be loved, don’t you, Olivia?”
She wanted to be loved. More than anything.
And with every errand, every small task she carried out for her new masters, the deeper she sank into the abyss.
***
“You stabbed me,” Olivia hissed, crouching in a ravine at the edge of the school walls and rubbing her bandaged arm. Elmer answered her with a sadistic giggle.
“Had to make it look good while you and your idiot friends were assaulting me. Believe me, it was harder than you think. Oh, not cutting you, that was easy. But a fraction of an inch in either direction and I would have nicked an artery. Here. Trade me.”
The glittering silver talisman in his hands was a twin for the one he’d given her at the Night Market. She took hers off and swapped it, eyeing the trinket nervously.
“What’s this for?”
“It uses the Kronstein Method to bypass most basic alarm cantrips. Suppresses them, really, by trapping the transmission in a pocket of extremely slow time. Any wards you trigger will go off, just…a year or so from now, long after it will have ceased to matter. I’ll teach you how to use it. Mr. Shaddock and I have a shopping list for you. Things to acquire and bring to us.”
“How long?” Olivia asked him, her eyes distant and hopeless. “How long do I have to keep doing this?”
“Until the job is done, my dear. But if you serve us faithfully, none of your friends will be hurt. I promise. You alone can protect them. You alone can keep them safe. So really, when you think about it, you’re doing a good thing here, aren’t you?”
***
Olivia stood there, reeling, lost for a moment in her memories. But this was it, the end of her treason, the last wicked deed she’d ever have to do. Dalton would tell everyone what she’d done, she knew, but at least he’d survive. They’d all survive. Her friends would all hate her, but they’d live, and that was all that mattered.
Mr. Shaddock crouched, grunting, scooped up Dalton’s trembling body, and slung it over his shoulder. Olivia stared at him.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a small voice.
“He might be valuable. We’re taking him with us.”
She shook her head, stammering. “N-no, that wasn’t the deal! No one else is supposed to get hurt. You promised.”
“Elmer promised, not me, and he was lying to you anyway,” the rat-man replied, shambling down the forest trail.
“I could scream,” she said, staring back at the Academy walls.
Shaddock responded by clamping one hand on Dalton’s scalp.
“And I could twist your friend’s head off. Maybe I’ll kill him, or maybe I’ll just leave him paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. Don’t be foolish. Come along.”
She walked at his side, quietly frantic.
“We had a deal,” she repeated.
“You fail to understand. Typical human. A deal is only as strong as the person who makes it.” Shaddock’s eyes were bloody gemstones in the dark. “I am strong, and you are weak. I can change the terms as I like, and you can do nothing to stop me. Do you know the difference between yourself and a slave?”
“No,” Olivia said.
“There isn’t any. Comport yourself accordingly, or I might decide you’re too much trouble to keep alive.”
He shifted his weight, bouncing Dalton on his furry shoulder.
“After all, now I have a spare.”
“But the Network—”
“You aren’t dealing with the Network anymore,” he grunted. “Thanks to you and your friends, I’m not getting paid for my contract with Elmer. All that hard work, up in smoke. Now you’re dealing with Clan Keshyre, and you owe us for my lost wages. No worries. We’ll get our money’s worth out of you both, one way or another. My sister will decide your value.”
Twenty minutes later Olivia was sitting on the grass with her wrists and ankles tied, yoked together by a leash of muddy, rotten rope. Dalton lay next to her, flat on his side, bound and gagged with a dirty scrap of cloth. He was awake now. And glaring at her, quietly furious as he wrestled with his bonds.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to him, fingers straining, desperate to touch. To comfort or be comforted, she wasn’t sure. “I never wanted any of this.”
Shaddock knelt before a tripod with a stolen screwdriver in his teeth, putting on the finishing touches before standing back. The Resonator was a tree of lights, vintage filament bulbs flaring, crackling, flashing in the dark as the tripod’s arms began to spin. The air filled with the scent of roses and a distant jingling sound, like wind chimes playing out a sad lullaby.
***
Comet galloped down the forest trail, the wind roaring in Amy’s ears as she leaned into his neck and held the reins tight. Elmer’s overheard words, from back on the sub, were fresh in her ears: “Set a new meeting for tonight. South side of the island, by the old submarine pens. No, I’ll come to you.”
Olivia and Dalton were missing. A few students had seen them walk out into the courtyard together on some kind of errand and then…nothing.
I can’t be too late, I can’t be—
She threw an arm over her eyes as the horizon erupted with the light of a falling meteor. Comet hauled himself to a stop, rearing, hooves slashing at the air as he whinnied in terror.
A ship hovered over the clearing ahead, rising into the air, jets of flame scorching the grass black as it took to the skies. It was a monstrosity of rusted scrap, of spikes and rivets, of ancient rotary cannons inscribed with blasphemous glyphs and a jutting cockpit with jet-black angled windows. It was a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together in a junkyard and yet, impossibly, it flew. Amy watched in horror as its landing gear folded into its belly with a grinding metallic rasp.
Then another blast of light washed across the forest, turning night into day for one dazzling second as a concussive bubble erupted with the sound of a thunderclap.
When Amy’s vision cleared, it was gone.
They were gone.
Chapter forty-three
Asecret conclave of four gathered in the back wing of the school library, far from Adelaide’s desk and the dancing fireflies, at a remote and forgotten round table in the shadow of the tall mahogany stacks.
Amy thumped a pile of books onto the heart of the table. History books, treatises on alien biology and culture, eyewitness reports from explorers of the In-Between.
“I don’t get it,” Bahati said. “It’s been two days. The headmistress won’t even tell us what they’re doing, just that it’s ‘not my concern.’”
She drew herself up, glaring.
“Like hell it isn’t.”
“Agreed,” Vail said. She reached in, starting to sort through the books. “What’ve you got?”
“Clues, hopefully,” Amy said. “Look, these rat-people, they can’t just land on a normal parallel Earth like we can. They kinda stand out in a crowd. There aren’t that many places that we know of, in the entire multiverse, where they can touch down, refuel and resupply that ship without raising a fuss. We narrow it down, find the most likely places they’d land…”
“And then we hunt,” Vail said.
Colin had been quieter than usual, grim and withdrawn. He nodded, staring at the books, reaching for the closest one.
“Whatever it takes,” Colin said. “Olivia’s our friend and Dalton…Dalton’s my brother. I know that if the situation was reversed, he’d walk through fire to get me back alive. I won’t let him down.”
A shadow loomed over them.
“Room for one more?” Professor Lanca asked.
Colin slumped. “Busted.”
“Not by a long shot.”
Lanca pulled back the fifth, empty chair and joined them.
“I can answer your question, by the way,” he told Bahati. “The answer is, the headmistress is negotiating through certain backchannels.”
Bahati stared at him. “Negotiating?”
“Not with Shaddock directly. You see, there’s a…political problem here. These rats are formed into a ragged coalition of clans. Shaddock and his family are the esteemed vassals of Clan Keshyre. Collectively these clans control a sizable fleet of void-ships, vessels capable of traveling the In-Between, navigating the winds of pure magical energy just like a sailing-ship takes to the water. One of the Academy’s investors very much wants to forge an alliance with the clans and get access to that fleet.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Vail said.
Lanca shrugged. “As you can imagine, if the Academy sent a strike team and took out an entire branch of Clan Keshyre’s diseased family tree, it would sour the deal.”
“They kidnapped our friends,” Amy protested.
“You see it that way, and I see it that way, but culturally these people have a very strong sense of…finder’s keepers. If you can take something and you’re strong enough to keep it, it belongs to you. Dalton and Olivia are bargaining chips now in a political tussle that really has nothing to do with them. It happens.”
Lanca leaned back. His steady gaze moved from face to face, taking them in, taking their measure, as he came to a quiet decision.
“But…what if?” He drummed his fingers on the table. “What if something unexpected happened? What if, say, a crew of, oh, I don’t know, void pirates boarded that ship and freed the captives? If they covered their tracks very, very well, and left no clues behind…”
“Then no one would be able to blame the Academy,” Amy said.
“Chen Lan will never authorize something like that, of course,” he pointed out. “Too risky. Too dangerous.”
“How about you, Professor Lanca?” Vail asked. “Are you in an authorizing kind of mood?”
He forced a small, polite, fake laugh.
“Oh, I don’t have the authority. But I do have access, contacts, and information that some aspiring pirates might find useful.”
He rested his palms flat on the polished wood.
“Or it could get you all expelled. Or, more likely, it’ll get you all killed. Let me be clear: my help is very conditional. I’m not involved, I know nothing, I saw nothing, and if you get caught I’ll deny everything and leave you to dangle in the wind without a second thought.”
Amy, Vail, Bahati, and Colin shared a long look between them. A wordless understanding. Compared to what was at stake, the risks didn’t matter.
“Why are you helping us at all?” Colin asked.
Lanca contemplated that.
“I had a brother once, too,” he said. “Someone reminded me of that, recently. Sometimes I wonder, if I’d spent more time appreciating what I had, instead of grasping for more…”
He fell silent and shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter. Oh, and if you’re wondering if I have ulterior motives and I’m manipulating you to pursue some mysterious agenda of my own,” Lanca added, “yes. I am. There. Now you don’t have to waste any time thinking about it. So…ready to rescue your friends?”
Amy held her hand out to the heart of the table, extended over the pile of books. Vail was next, covering hers, then Bahati and Colin. Professor Lanca was last, adding his hand to the silent vow.
“All right,” Amy said. “Let’s get to work.”
Afterword
Second books in a series like this one (five books and done, with a planned-out character and narrative arc from start to finish) can be tricky. This is the point where everything tends to go a little Empire Strikes Back: the stakes have to be higher than in book one, while leaving room for escalation in the books to come. Things have to get dark, to show the characters' plight, but not too dark, and set up a path to rocket straight into the next installment. It's a big balancing act, and hopefully I succeeded. (Fortunately, unlike the three-year gap between Empire and Return of the Jedi, you won't have to wait nearly that long for book three: I've been working on the Castaways series behind the scenes for nearly two years, to make sure of it.)
And even in times of darkness, I reflect as I sip my coffee and read the morning news, there's still hope. Always hope, as long as we work together. It's a kind of magic, after all.
Speaking of working together, every book is a team effort. Special thanks to Jay Ben Markson, my fantastic editor, and Rebecca Frank, my fabulous cover designer. And of course, thanks to you for reading! If you'd like to be notified when new books are released (such as, for instance, the upcoming third book in this very series), you can hop onto my mailing list over at https://craigschaeferbooks.com/mailing-list.
Craig Schaefer, Firebreak
