No. You will not take the child.
I couldn’t stop the instincts she triggered, the feverish need to protect her at all costs. I’d kill them all to save her, if I had to, and never look back.
She’s my child, the Voice whispered in my ears. She will never be yours. I will make her one of my warriors, and you and your kind will be wiped from existence, thrown into the darkness where not even memories remain. She will destroy you.
Isabel disappeared into the door of the white house, which sealed itself against me.
I had to abandon her. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, to turn away, to run with the sick taste of rage and defeat in my mouth.
I darted around buildings, running with as much speed as I could manage. I had no goal now, nothing but the blind desire to live, escape, find another way to get to Isabel. Bullets spanged and cracked around me, and sometimes found their mark. I couldn’t heal myself from the wounds, but I could close it off and ignore it for a time, and I did.
It burst upon me, with a blinding jolt, that there was still a goal.
I turned toward the prison.
When I reached it, moving so fast I was a blur, there were guards at the door. I barely slowed enough to disable both in screaming agony, then melted the metal outer door.
And then the vault door of the first cell.
Luis Rocha was slumped in a corner, pale and unshaven, barely conscious. His head lolled when I tried to raise him to his feet, and although I could sense the power inside of him, he was blocked from the source by the blanket of drugs circulating in him.
I couldn’t heal myself as easily, but I could clear his bloodstream. It was an investment of power, not a cost; as soon as he was cleared, his power began to flow back to me, through our touch.
His hands wrapped around my wrists, and our gazes locked.
“Cassiel,” he whispered. “Oh, Christ, what have you done?”
I must have looked very different to him.
“Whatever was necessary,” I said. I was leaking blood on the floor from wounds I didn’t feel. “Stand. We have little time.”
He scrambled up. They had also outfitted him in the flimsy yellow jumpsuit and prisoner shoes. I glared at it but decided our power would be better spent toward gaining our escape from this place, before—
The entire building rumbled. Dust sifted from overhead, and the lights flickered.
“Was that you?” Luis asked me. I shook my head. “Me, neither—”
Tree roots exploded up from the floor, cracking concrete. Sharp, jagged roots like daggers, then swords. It happened fast, too fast for us to counter it immediately, and one of the roots erupted under Luis’s feet, stabbing through his foot and into his leg.
He screamed and tried to pull free. As I was helping him, another root ripped through the stone floor, thick and strong as a telephone pole, and almost skewered me from below. I stumbled aside. It continued to rise, slamming into the ceiling above and shattering the impact-resistant plastic cover of the lights.
“Go!” Luis screamed at me. I shook my head and pulled his leg free of the root that impaled it, picked him up in my arms, and began to run.
It was only nine steps, I told myself. Nine steps from the back of the room to the door.
I jumped the last three, praying I had guessed right, as a whole forest of roots erupted from the floor and sliced in all directions.
We hit one of the thick, pale structures and bounced—but we bounced out, not in. I didn’t pause. I hit the ground with both feet and kept running, because the roots followed us, trying to outpace and outflank me. But it was a doomed effort—too much open space, and once we had gained the outside air, too many of their own people in the way to continue an indiscriminate attack.
There was a jeep—possibly the same one that had brought me to this prison in the first place—parked next to the prison building, with the keys dangling in the ignition. I dumped Luis in the seat, climbed behind the wheel, and in seconds we were rocketing for the gate.
I didn’t particularly care if adults got out of my way. I hardly slowed as the bumpers sent them flying from the path.
I knew by this time that they would try to use the children to stop me, so it was not a surprise to see those ragged young bodies lined up in front of the gate, only a grim confirmation.
I couldn’t stop. Not this time.
“Luis!” I yelled. “Can you open a gap somewhere else?”
He nodded. I pointed.
Where I pointed, the inner wall exploded in a shower of bricks. The children were in the wrong place. One of them tried to scramble in front of us—C. T. Styles.
I slowed just enough to grab the boy by the scruff of his neck and sling him into the jeep on the passenger’s side, into Luis’s surprised embrace. “Put him out!” I ordered, and then I was testing the jeep’s ability to scale a shifting mess of broken wall. The tires slipped; the vehicle tilted—then held and climbed.
Beside me, Luis slapped a hand to the child’s forehead and used a burst of power to put him to sleep. “I don’t like doing that!” he shouted, which forced me to laugh a little wildly. There was nothing in this I liked. I didn’t like the fact that we were in an open vehicle, with gunmen drawing their aim on us, while we slithered across broken bricks into a killing field. I didn’t like the fact that I had little chance of surviving this.
I didn’t like the gnawing terror of knowing how much I could lose even if I did survive. Isabel. Luis. My . . . family.
I glanced over at him, through the blowing fury of my pink hair. He had the sleeping little boy in the crook of one arm and the other braced against the dashboard, and Luis’s answering look was full of mad, unbelievable energy.
Just like mine, I suspected.
“Here we go,” I said, and the tires bit the barren ground between the walls. I took one hand off the steering wheel and held it out to him, and Luis stopped bracing himself on the dash and instead gave me his hand, his power, his will. There was no conversation between us. None needed.
I pulled power from him and drove it deep under the wall. I softened the ground beneath a long swath.
The wall sagged, but didn’t fall. Braced with an internal lacing of steel.
Luis battered at the bricks, but the external wall had been hardened against magical attacks, and now we could feel the dampening influences around us—Weather and Fire were at work, as well as opposing Earth forces.
We weren’t going to make it. The jeep was hurtling at the wall at speed. If we hit and it didn’t go down, we would die. C.T.’s small body would be smashed by the impact; if Luis and I survived, we’d be easily picked off by the Wardens and soldiers.
The wall had to come down. I shook the ground, and the entire structure shuddered and bled dust. Some of the concrete shattered and fell away, revealing a sinister skeleton of iron beneath.
I hit it with a final blast of power a millisecond before the jeep’s front grille smashed into the structure with stunning force . . . and in that second, the steel turned translucent, and as we hit it, the crystalline structure exploded into showers of glass.
I ducked instinctively, as did Luis, curving over the unconscious boy on his lap. A shower of shards blew over us, and I felt a hundred hot cuts, but all superficial.
We were lucky. A sharp, daggerlike fragment landed between us and buried itself several inches deep in the plastic and fiber of the edge of Luis’s seat. Another few inches and it might have severed an arm, or landed in his skull.
Bullets rang in a hot chatter along the metal. I pressed the accelerator, and we bounced over the remains of the wall and out into the open ground.
“Faster!” Luis yelled.
I knew that. My foot was all the way down, and we were still accelerating, tearing along the rough dirt road that led into the forest.