“We have to go,” she said. “It’s not safe here. We have to cross the border.”
“But — ”
Glenn took her father’s arm. “We’ll reverse the bracelet again and give it to Mom,” she said. “She’ll be fine. I promise.”
“Go, Glenn. We’ll start for the border and meet you there.”
Glenn dashed inside and down the stairs into the basement
workshop. The tools were right where she’d left them. Glenn stripped off the bracelet and bent over the workbench. As she opened its metal housings, Glenn found a strange giddiness building up in her. They would all be together for the first time since she was a little girl. Until that moment, Glenn had no idea how much she wanted it, how much she always had.
The outer shell of the bracelet fell away and she lifted a small pair of pliers, but before she could make the first modification, the entire house was rocked by the blare of Authority loudspeakers.
31
Glenn stepped out onto the porch. It was flooded with the light from four Authority skiffs that hovered in a soundless crescent around the house. The gaps between the skiffs were filled by cross-shaped drones.
Two of the agents, armed with sleek rifles, held Mom and Dad behind Michael Sturges.
“Impressive how you broke your dad out,” Sturges said, cheery as ever. “Guess you figured out how to bring a little bit of the hocus-pocus over to this side of the world, huh?”
He waited, that friendly smile playing across his lips, but Glenn said nothing. The night air was brittle and still. Wrapped in their suits of high-tech armor, the agents were nothing to her, black holes scattered about the yard. Only Sturges pulsed with a cool malevolence.
Glenn’s own pulse beat against the unaltered bracelet on her wrist.
She imagined a river pounding against the walls of a dam. Power hummed through her. The river wanted to surge, to batter their bodies and drown them all, but Glenn wouldn’t let it. She would master it. She would command its course.
“Nothing more needs to happen to any of you,” Sturges
continued in a maddeningly casual tone. “All we want is that piece of tin you have there. You’re a smart girl. I think you know that this is for the best.” Sturges reached out his hand, palm up, as if he was asking her to return a toy she had played with out of turn. “Just give it to me, and everything in your life goes back to the way it was.”
Glenn almost laughed at the lie. He’d never let them rest, not for a second. Not any of them. The ground began to shake. Trees shuddered and the glass in the windows behind her rang like a string of bells. The agents shifted, trying to keep their footing, but Sturges just stood and grinned. The river crashed inside of Glenn, tearing out its course, slipping out of her hands.
“You should go,” Glenn warned. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Sturges paused, his hand flexed and relaxed at his side. He was unsure now, afraid. The dam inside her groaned, and across the yard a tree burst into flames. Glenn slashed her hand through the air and Sturges went flying into the trees. The second he did, one of the men on the skiff opened fire. There were two sharp cracks, but Glenn closed her eyes, and the air instantly thickened, catching the rounds like pebbles cast into deep water. They slowed and fell harmlessly onto the ground. A talon of fire that would burn the man alive reared back from Glenn, but she restrained it before it could strike. Instead, Glenn called up a gust of wind strong enough to topple the skiff he was riding on. He and the agents with him tumbled twenty feet to the hard ground below.
Gunfire roared all around her now, far too many bullets for Glenn to stop, so she bounded into the air, blazing with a halo of yellow light.
She landed in the center of one of the other skiffs, surrounded by a mob of agents. They scrambled for her, but there were too many of them and their numbers made them an awkward scrum of arms and bodies. In the confusion, Glenn focused the air into a spike of force and shot it down at her feet, ripping straight through the skiff’s metal skin. The technology inside sparked and flared and the skiff began to plummet, moaning like a dying beast. Glenn jumped into the sky as the agents dove off, trying to save themselves. Glenn took the dying skiff in hand and hurled it toward the other one, knocking it out of the sky.
Glenn flitted toward the forest quick as a firefly as the agents fruitlessly tried to track her movements. Her power was enormous and thrumming, but it felt different now — as much a part of her as her arms and legs. As the agents fired, she dropped whole trees in their path and tore at the earth beneath their feet, sending them into confused piles.
A flight of drones shot soundlessly toward Glenn in a fan. Glenn flew higher and released a torrent of lightning from her fingertips, expecting to fry the circuits inside them, but the drones were too well insulated. The blue energy crackled and dissipated against their gray hides. They moved fast, surrounding her, firing wave after wave of their poisoned darts. Glenn pushed them away, but they came too fast, one after the other. Glenn managed to bring five of them down with a blast of fire, yet more rose up to take their place. They were everywhere. A swarm of hornets.
Glenn tried to keep them all in front of her, but one of the drones shifted to her left and there was a sharp sting at the base of her neck.
The poison did its work fast, tearing through her blood. They were smart — there was nothing high-tech about the poison. It would work even within her cocoon of Affinity. Glenn’s arms went numb and then her legs. She tried to summon a final blast that would destroy them all, but her head was swimming; she couldn’t concentrate. She tumbled in the sky, about to fall.
Three more darts struck her, two from behind, one from in front.
These weren’t poisoned, but each one was attached to one of their long lines of cable. The drones leapt forward and began to encircle her. The thread, strong as steel, pinned her arms to her body. Her ankles snapped together and were bound tight.
Glenn tried to focus, but she was slipping away, the poison soaking deeper and deeper into her. As the drones wound her in their spider’s silk, Glenn focused on the poison. It was a nettled thing tumbling through her blood, biting at her muscles, clouding her thoughts. Glenn took hold of it, shattering the cells that made up the poison, destroying it, but it was too late. By the time she had expelled it from her system the drones had her bound tight. It was a struggle to even draw a breath.
A shock exploded through her, and Glenn realized she had hit the ground.
She opened her eyes and saw one of the paving stones beneath her shoulder. It was splashed with her own blood. Her ribs screamed with fresh pain. The drones had completely covered her and were now retreating with the barest wisp of sound. A heavy tread crunched through the hard-frosted ground. Glenn managed to scoot away and fell onto her back, gasping.
The drones moved away as Sturges lowered himself down beside her, his gun perfectly balanced toward her temple. Glenn imagined the feel of the bullet, a white-hot foreign thing tearing through her body followed by a blast of darkness.
“Shh,” Sturges whispered. “It’s going to be okay.”
Glenn pushed herself away from Sturges, trying to buy time.
Now that the poison was out of her system she expected her Affinity would flood back into her. But before it could, Sturges simply reached down with his one free hand and snatched the bracelet off her wrist.
He tossed it to an agent standing behind him. “Go,” he
commanded. “Now!”
Already the world was going flat at the edge of her vision as her Affinity vanished. Sturges turned back to Glenn, the barrel of his gun a hard O on her skin.
“I’m honestly sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want it to end like this.”
His finger tensed on the trigger, but before he could fire, there was a screech as Hopkins launched himself over Glenn’s body and sank his claws into Sturges’s throat.