With a Golden Sword (DFZ Changeling Book 2), page 3
St. Claire’s Hospital, Rm 5020
Simon
She crushed the note in her fist, burying the evidence deep inside her gossamer even though there was no one here to see it except her sleeping sister. You couldn’t be too careful in a barrow, and Lola already knew that Tristan wouldn’t like this. She wasn’t sure she liked it, because slipping her a note with the one thing that could convince her to leave the safety of Tristan’s magic sure looked like bait.
The thought had barely crossed her mind before Lola tossed it back out. What had happened under the arena that night wasn’t Valente’s fault. Victor had ordered him to kill her, and she knew from Tristan just how impossible it was for a knight to say no. She was also pretty sure this wasn’t one of her former master’s plans. Victor had never cared enough about her non-work life to realize she had a cat, but Valente knew exactly how much her furry chonk meant to her. If he was sending messages via Buster, it had to be because he wanted to help.
Or because he was still following Victor’s kill order and had gotten tired of waiting.
Scowling, Lola pulled out Simon’s phone—which she still had—and typed the hospital’s name into the search bar. As expected, St. Claire’s turned out to be a classic Skyways for-profit institution on the north side of town, the sort of place celebrities went to get their secret plastic surgery done. It was also outside of Fenrir’s arc of destruction, making it the perfect location for Victor to stash someone he didn’t want the rest of the world knowing about.
Also the perfect place for an ambush. Not that the Rider needed to ambush her, but the rest of Victor’s forces were another story. Maybe her old master had decided Valente had failed long enough, and this note was just the bait he’d been ordered to lay for a new trap.
Lola’s mind was leaping through all the ways this could go wrong when she made herself stop. Trap or no trap, this was the first lead she’d had in weeks, which meant she had to take it. Quickly. She wasn’t sure how fast the Wild Hunt could ride across the sea, but it didn’t sound like Alberich was planning to take his time. If she was going to save anyone before the hammer came down, it had to be now.
“So much for not being stupid,” she whispered, glancing at her sleeping sister. “Ready to do something rash and ill-advised?”
As ever, her sister said nothing, but the question hadn’t been for her. Lola had to know if she was ready. She’d been working on how not to get Rider-snatched the moment she stepped outside the barrow for weeks now, and while she did have a plan in mind, it was going to be rough, assuming it even worked.
There was no way to know until she tried, so Lola retrieved Buster from the floor and moved him to the chair behind her.
“This is going to look pretty weird,” she warned. “Don’t freak out on me.”
Buster gave her an annoyed meow and hopped onto the windowsill overlooking the snowy mountains, ignoring Lola completely as she began working her gossamer like clay.
~~~
Thirty minutes later, she’d created a perfect replica of herself. It wasn’t just in looks, either. The fake Lola could talk and answer questions with the same knowledge as the real one, provided no one asked her anything too complicated. It was the sort of creation real fairies made all the time, but it was Lola’s greatest work of gossamer ever. She’d never attempted anything close to this complex before, but she’d had a lot of time to practice during the long, dull days waiting for her sister to wake up, and the results showed.
“What’s your name?” she asked the gossamer double sitting in her chair.
“Lola,” the copy answered without looking up from the crime drama she was watching on Simon’s phone.
“What’s your favorite food?”
“Christmas sugar cookies that are at least half icing but only if they have the hard icing because the soft kind is gross. They should crack when you bite into them and be covered in sprinkles but not the silver ball kind because eating metal is weird.”
That was exactly Lola’s opinion. The TMI answer would never pass, though, so she made some adjustments. When her double was finally able to answer simple questions normally, Lola plucked the phone out of her hands.
“Hey!” the other Lola cried.
“I’ll give it right back,” the original promised, struggling to operate the large phone with her now much-smaller-than-usual hands.
Making such a complex creation had taken nearly all of Lola’s gossamer, leaving her with barely enough magic to form the child body she was currently inhabiting. This was by design. She hadn’t forgotten what Tristan had said when she’d found him waiting by her car the morning after the Paladins arrested her. He’d gone to where the majority of her gossamer was, which meant the compass fairies got when they ate her dreams wasn’t foolproof. They were drawn to the largest piece, so if Lola left the bigger percentage of herself inside the barrow, Valente should think she was still here.
As would Tristan, which was very convenient. She’d meant it when she said he didn’t give her orders, but pissing off the only person protecting you from certain death was generally considered a bad idea. He was busy with his queen at the moment, though, and so long as no one pried too hard, the double made a perfectly passable Lola. If she played her cards right, Tristan wouldn’t even know she’d slipped out until she came back with Simon.
Smiling at her cleverness, Lola turned her attention back to the cell phone. Just like the doppelganger, copying advanced electronics was a trick she never could have pulled off back when she’d been on Victor’s pills. Cars and other devices whose purpose could be summed up in a few words were one thing, but something like a cell phone that had to interact with a network of real signals and security checks to function was a whole other ballgame.
The closest she’d been able to get before was a radio that picked up actual radio waves, but Lola was a different changeling now. Five minutes after she’d taken the phone from her grumpy double, she had a working copy of her very own.
She held the cell phone up like a trophy when it was finished. She wasn’t sure if the leap in her abilities was because Victor’s blood was gone or if not being terrified all the time had finally allowed her to harness her true potential. Whatever the reason, Lola loved it. Her magic was solid as a rock these days without a single pill, giving her the confidence to try things she’d never dared before, like squeezing her entire consciousness into the body of a gossamer ten-year-old.
It still wasn’t easy. Lola made things that were bigger than her all the time, but going smaller was a lot trickier, especially this small. She’d whittled her current body down to the barest essentials to make sure as much of her magic as possible remained with her decoy. The result was a terrifyingly thin waif of a girl made of barely enough magic to keep Lola functional.
Forget making cars or disguises. She was running on so little, Lola wasn’t sure she’d be able to jump her mind back to the rest of her gossamer if the Rider did catch her. She justified the risk by telling herself she’d be no more dead than if she’d gone out with more magic and gotten caught like that. There was just no safe way to do something this dangerous, so Lola sucked it up, sliding her shiny new phone into the pocket of the little girl’s poofy purple coat.
“Here,” she said, returning Simon’s original cell phone to her double. “I’ll be home in a few hours. Don’t gain sentience.”
“’Kay,” the other Lola said, her eyes already glued back to her TV show.
When Lola was sure she’d stay that way, she grabbed Buster off the windowsill and wrestled him back into his crate.
“I’m sorry,” she said at his angry meowing. “But I’ve seen what you do to spiders. If you disembowel one of Tristan’s pixies while I’m out, the whole jig is up. Just sit tight. I promise I’ll bring you back something nice.”
She gave him her best smile, but the cat just lashed his tail resentfully. Resigning herself to being hated for a while, Lola walked over to her sister.
“I’m going to rescue our brother,” she whispered, squeezing the sleeping girl’s warm hand. “Don’t move until I get back.”
It was the same joke she always made. But while her sister didn’t move or twitch or do anything that could possibly be interpreted as a response, Lola swore she felt the silver thread pull a little.
That was probably just wishful thinking, but it made her feel like her sister was with her as she crept through the empty living room toward the hallway where Tristan kept his doors.
Chapter 3
Lola hadn’t been down Tristan’s low road since he’d saved her from the Rider three weeks ago. It looked the same as it had back then, all fresh white paint and sky-blue carpet, but the once-sturdy walls now rippled like fabric curtains, and the carpeted floor creaked loudly beneath her feet. The sound was especially ominous since Tristan had never been able to adequately explain exactly what his low road ran through. For all Lola knew, she was one misstep away from plummeting into the void between worlds.
Thanking her lucky stars she’d picked a small body for this venture, Lola eased down the hallway one step at a time, keeping as far from the walls as possible just in case that did anything. At least she didn’t have far to go. There were only seven doors in the hall today. All of them looked the same, so Lola went for the closest, wrenching the brass knob with her little child hands to open the way into somewhere very dark.
It still looked safer than Tristan’s rickety low road, so she plunged inside. It was only after she’d shut the door—which looked like rusty metal from this side—that Lola realized she was in an alley.
At least, it used to be an alley. It looked more like a cave now thanks to the massive chunk of collapsed Skyway lying on top of the crushed buildings. Water from the most recent snow poured down the cracks in the broken concrete, turning the ground into a slimy black river. Still more dripped down through the fissures in the collapsed roadway overhead, the drops landing like icy needles in her hair.
“Guess even the Living City can’t fix everything in three weeks,” Lola whispered to her sister’s thread as she pulled up her child body’s purple hood. “Come on. Let’s go see where we are.”
She inched her way forward, grateful yet again for her small body as she crawled under fallen electrical cables and wiggled around crushed dumpsters. The collapsed chunk of bridge was nearly a hundred feet wide, so it took a lot of creeping, but eventually she reached the place where the alley ended and the fallen Skyway gave way to open sky.
“Wow,” she breathed, shielding her eyes against the sudden brightness. “That’s something you don’t see every day.”
She was standing on a road in what had been the DFZ Underground, but the gray November sky was no longer blocked by bridges and buildings. All of that was gone, replaced by a chasm filled with twisting steel and concrete. The fissure actually started just a few feet in front of her, but when she leaned forward to peer over the edge, what she saw sent her scrambling right back.
Thanks to Queen Morgan’s twenty-four-hour news habit, Lola had seen plenty of footage of Fenrir’s destruction. But things never looked as big on camera as they did in real life, and the gorge in front of her was so massive it made her dizzy. The whole city from here to the Detroit River had been leveled, the superscrapers ripped up by the roots to reveal the network of buried electrical tunnels, sewers, and pipes below. Water was leaking everywhere thanks to the wet November snow, but while that would have been a problem in other disaster zones, here it was a feature, keeping the ground loose and pliable for the giant sewer pipes that tunneled through it like worms.
The Living City might have taken a hit, but she was definitely still alive. Like a forest after a fire, the ground teemed with motion. Water pipes, electrical cables, and brightly colored telecom lines spread through the wreckage like roots. Between them, the foundations of buildings sprouted like saplings, forming floors, windows, and staircases before Lola’s eyes. The tallest, an apartment complex, had already risen past where the Skyway bridges used to be, its rooftop solar panels unfurling like spring leaves as the new building stretched up toward the dreary sky.
The roads were regrowing as well. Lola could already see the first marks of a new grid, but for some reason, they weren’t on the ground level where she was standing. All the new roads seemed to be forming several dozen feet below the original Old Detroit streets, making her gasp in excitement.
“I don’t believe it,” Lola whispered, clutching her sister’s thread. “I thought she was digging down because Fenrir had damaged her foundations, but I see it now. She’s putting in another layer!”
It was more than that. The broken chunks of buildings weren’t just lying at the bottom of the pit because they’d fallen there. They’d been sunk into the earth on purpose to serve as underground platforms, presumably for some kind of new transportation system.
Lola really hoped it was a subway. Traffic had always been terrible in the DFZ, but the last few years had been the worst she could remember. A subway would change all of that, though given how dedicated the DFZ was to her cars, it could also have been the start of an underground highway.
Whatever the new construction ended up being, seeing it lifted Lola’s heart. She’d worried Victor had broken the DFZ for good with his play for godhood, but the city looked like she was bouncing back. Maybe not as quickly as everyone wanted, but she wasn’t beaten yet.
“I can’t wait to see what it looks like when she’s done,” Lola said, shifting her eyes to the narrow line of undestroyed buildings and Skyway bridges that still stood like a cliff to the north. Simon’s hospital was up there somewhere, but it was a long walk for little legs, especially with a giant construction zone in the way. Her copy of Simon’s phone included his ride-share apps, but the island of crushed buildings Tristan’s door had opened into didn’t look like it connected to the rest of the city anymore. If Lola wanted to reach the hospital before nightfall, she was going to have to try again.
Just thinking about going back into the rickety low road made her knees wobble, but Lola forced herself to turn around, slipping back through the crack beneath the collapsed Skyway bridge and up the flooded alley to the rusted door she’d come out of. She’d just wrapped her hand around the knob when she caught a flash of blue out of the corner of her eye.
She whirled around at once, but the alley was empty. It was also so dark that she couldn’t have seen anything even if it had been there. A floodlight would have fixed that, but Lola’s tiny body didn’t have so much as a light bulb’s worth of gossamer to spare, so she settled for breathing deep through her nose, searching the damp air for any hint of midwinter magic.
She was almost disappointed when she didn’t find anything. Not that she wanted to get caught by the Rider, but being outside the bubble of Tristan’s barrow made her remember the times that hadn’t been so bad. Even when she was convinced Victor had abandoned her to die, Valente had been good company. Less so when he’d betrayed her, but still, she missed him.
Shaking her head at how pathetic that was, Lola grabbed the rusty doorknob and shoved her way back into Tristan’s low road. The floor creaked just as alarmingly now as it had before, but Lola was tired of being timid. She charged ahead, grabbing the next knob in the line.
It took her four tries before she found a door that opened somewhere she deemed acceptable. It wasn’t actually closer to the hospital than the first, but where that door had stranded her in the middle of the DFZ’s pit of rebirth, this door opened into the familiar chaos of Riverfest, which was far more useful.
Like Lola herself, Riverfest was a temporary creation that had grown into something much, much greater. It used to be a weekend boat show and craft fair at the end of summer, but the floating market had been so popular that the organizers kept extending the dates until eventually the festival ran all year long. It had gotten way bigger, too, with hundreds of floating shops and restaurants tied to an ever-expanding network of piers and pontoon docks that jutted out into the wide neck of water where Lake St. Clair emptied into the Detroit River.
This put it directly below the northern swath of city that had escaped Fenir’s destruction. Still on the totally wrong end of things from the hospital, but at least the roads here were intact. That was good enough for Lola’s rapidly falling standards, so she double-checked her costume and stepped through the door, grabbing the garishly painted wall on the other side for support as her little feet landed on the gently rocking floor.
Tristan’s door came out next to the restrooms inside Riverfest’s biggest floating restaurant, the Dandy Lobster. Given the state of the city, Lola would have expected it to be deserted, but she should have had more faith. This was the DFZ, the city that didn’t know the meaning of the word “stop.” The place was packed to the rafters despite a huge banner on the wall announcing a thirty-percent disaster markup on all menu items.
It was classic DFZ price gouging, but it still cheered Lola’s heart to see her city springing back. The thick crowd also made for nice cover as she darted toward the exit, dodging waiters carrying trays of lobster rolls and lobster ravioli and plates of vegetables shaped like lobsters until she made it to the gangplank that connected the floating restaurant to the docks outside.
Being one of the only intact shopping areas left in the city, Riverfest was packed with people, including tons of families. Kids were running everywhere, throwing things into the water and crowding the carts that sold light-up toy versions of the Hero’s golden sword, dragon-themed candy, and all other manner of parent-wallet bait. There was a rowboat selling piles of old Fenrir merch that no one was buying, a giant I SURVIVED THE END OF THE WORLD sign you could take selfies in front of for five bucks, and flocks of street hawkers selling every kind of food that could be put on a stick.
