So she looked up.
10
Venom was standing high up on a railingless Tower balcony, so high up that she couldn’t see anything of his features, especially with the misty rain blurring her vision—but she knew it was him. The way he stood, the way his suit so impeccably fit his body, it was pure Venom. And she knew he had his eyes on her; the rainbow hair was pretty and it made her happy, but it wasn’t exactly good for blending in.
Holly thought about waking up on his stone floor, of the honey in her veins after their insane sparring session, and knew that way led trouble. Dangerous, deadly trouble washed in sin. She made herself look away, forced her mind back to the problem of how to get into the Legion building.
Her free hand tingled at that instant.
She looked down . . . and saw her skin fading in and out. “No,” she whispered, curling her fingers into her palm to hide what was happening as she deliberately continued to eat her pretzel.
Nothing strange here, people, just a woman staring at the Legion building while stuffing her face as tiny droplets of rain dotted her hair and skin. Perfectly normal. Lots of people stared at the Legion building. The tourist buses didn’t dare cross the Tower’s territorial boundaries, but the non-Tower buildings lucky enough to have a direct view of part of the Legion building made good money renting out their roofs so the tourists could gawp at the beauty of a building bursting with greenery in the center of one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the planet.
Pretzel eaten and her misbehaving hand fully visible again, she put the scrunched-up wrapper in her pocket, then walked over to the thickest-looking vine and, taking a strong grip on greenery turned slick by the rain, began to climb. Her bones went liquid, her instincts sharpened, and her breath changed. She climbed like this was what she’d been born to do—and it wasn’t the human part of her that was in charge.
Exhilarated by how easy it was to scale the building, she didn’t care.
I’m not strong because I leash my impulses. I’m strong because I use those impulses.
Maybe Venom was right when it came to certain aspects of who she’d become . . . but Holly knew there were also things inside her that should never be set free.
When she reached the balcony in front of the opening on the fourth floor that functioned as both an exit and an entrance—a large section with transparent hanging flaps of thick, heavy plastic that she figured must help maintain the temperature within—she straightened up and said, “Hello? Can I come in?” It wasn’t polite to just invite yourself into someone’s house.
If no one answered, she’d climb back down and try again another day.
But one of the Legion landed beside her in deathly silence. Her heart thumped. “Good afternoon.”
Rising up from his crouch, he looked at her with eyes translucent but for an outer ring of blue, his hair the same midnight as Raphael’s, and his face too flawless. He appeared . . . unfinished in some strange way. As if life hadn’t yet put a mark on him. And yet, paradoxically, the sense of age that clung to him made her bones ache.
Angling his head slightly to the left in a way that simply wasn’t human, he said, “What are you?”
Holly fought the urge to touch his face, discover if he was warm or cold. “That’s the million-dollar question.” Suddenly remembering that the Legion were meant to be thousands upon thousands of years old, she said, “Do you know the answer?”
A slow shake of his head, his utter calm unnerving. “We are losing memories as we exist in this time and this place, but it isn’t only memory that makes us. We have knowledge woven into our bones.”
“And what does that knowledge tell you?”
“That you are new.” He cocked his head deeper to the side—she was almost afraid he was going to do that thing owls did and turn his head upside down. “But you are old, too, though not yet fully awake.”
Holly swallowed hard. “The otherness inside me, what is it?”
“You and not you.” With that cryptic statement that made her want to shake him, the Legion being turned away, folding his wings neatly to his back. “You are new. You can come inside. My brethren will wish to see you.”
Though she suddenly felt like a science exhibit, Holly’s curiosity nonetheless compelled her to move forward. A wash of humid air hit her face the instant she walked through the flaps behind him. That made sense, if— “Holy crap.” She felt her mouth drop open, her eyes widen.
The entire building had been hollowed out except for levels that jutted out here and there. Thick vines twisted up the sides, ferns grew from impossible angles, flowers bloomed in giant clumps, and below her feet was the thickest moss she’d ever felt. When she looked down to the ground floor, she saw trees heavy with pink and orange fruit. There was no sense of rot, of fallen leaves or fruit ever left forgotten. The scent in the air was a fresh amalgam of green and light and growth.
Holly stared and stared, wonder filling her heart to overflowing.
“This is so beautiful.” So much a thing of pure, unadulterated life.
Whispers surrounded her, coming from so many throats that she couldn’t separate one from the other. It was creepy, but this was the Legion after all. Creepy was their normal modus operandi. But then they started landing around her on wings of silence and she thought, Oh shit.
“You are new,” said the Legion being who’d brought her inside. “They have never seen you.”
It was a strange way to put it. Not something like you, but you. “You’ve seen Venom,” she said. “He’s like me.”
“He is a one being, too,” her guide said, as the others continued to whisper . . . without moving their mouths. “Like you but not you. Different.”
Since the Legion was staring full-out at her, Holly decided to stare back. She’d heard it said that when they’d arrived during the climactic battle of the fight between Raphael and Lijuan, they’d all looked exactly the same. Dusty gray hair without color, eyes utterly translucent, no sense of sunlight to their skin, wings as devoid of pigment as their hair.
These beings, however, while as similar as brothers, weren’t identical. Hair colors varied in subtle shades, skin tones were beginning to diverge in minute increments, and their otherwise still-translucent eyes bore rings of pale blue and pale green and pale brown and pale hazel. Only the one she’d first met had a more vivid ring, the color closer to Raphael’s intense blue.
“Why are your eyes so freaky pale?”
“We are becoming, too,” said a hundred voices, maybe more. “You are an echo who is not an echo. You are new.”
Holly was starting to understand why Elena looked as if she wanted to pull out her hair after she’d been talking to the Legion. “What does that even mean?”
But the Legion had gone quiet. A motionless, silent second later, they flew off on their batlike wings to settle all over the inside of the building—or to fly straight up to the roof exit that sat open to the misty rain and portentous clouds of darkest gray.
Only one was left, and it was the one who’d led her inside.
“Tell me what that means?” Holly asked softly. “Please?”
“That you are an echo who is not an echo. You are new.” He flared out his wings and was gone before she could reply.
“You guys are like the worst possible version of some inscrutable guru!” Holly shouted up.
They kept looking at her with that strange and oddly innocent curiosity. “Come back,” a hundred voices said. “We will be new together. After you are not an echo.”
Throwing up her hands, Holly stomped out—to slam into Venom’s chest. He caught her by the upper arms. She broke the hold and scowled, her face reflected back by the lenses of his sunglasses. “Do you know how to speak Legion?”