Heart of the Storm, page 18
Red light burst from the front of my body in a horizontal line that spread out in an ever-widening blast line that caught the soldiers at the midsection. With some it just vaporized a foot of flesh, bone, and vital organs across their pelvis; a few managed to leap clear. A few very short souls ducked and caught it just below the neck, dying instantly.
But the whole line of advance dissolved into chaos at that point. It struck and killed a swath of men thirty wide. Wade pivoted, swinging me around to line up with the next rank of soldiers, and I blasted them, too, unleashing the fury of the red hell that I conjured only when I didn't care how much damage I did.
The first blast struck the foundations of the building behind them before I remembered to dissolve it, and the whole building shook as its thirty-plus stories of weight suffered a radical reapportionment. I would have cringed, but I didn't care just now.
“More coming in behind us!” Wade shouted, I looked back to see him unleash a full Thor electrical barrage that caught six more Poseidons as they were leaping from the river. Water splashed, lightning flashed, and I turned away, trying to focus on the soldiers coming at us from the streets ahead as Wade watched our flank.
The army was leaping now, having watched two different divisions get cut in half; now they were varying their approach wildly, some running, some flying, some jumping. It would have been comical if it hadn't been our deaths coming at us.
I screamed out a sonic blast that halted the advance of forty or so soldiers, then cracked the gates of hell again, the red, onrushing wave of energy ripping across the pavement and bisecting them. All their attacks faded as they were ripped asunder, and I sprang back upright.
“We need an exit,” I said, glancing back to see that Wade had fried the Poseidons. He had one by the throat and was clutching him there, absorbing him and not paying him a bit of attention as he did so.
Wade clung to the soldier as he began his death rattle, and nodded. “Working on it. You good?”
I cracked the gates of hell one more time and watched it race parallel to a glowing skyscraper before it ripped through another platoon. I dissolved it as soon as it finished, before it could do further damage to beautiful downtown Guangzhou. “Probably, but let's not jinx it by malingering.” I glanced up at the ceiling of drones hanging overhead. “Sierra?” There was no answer. “Crap. Jammers are clearly online.”
“Yep,” Wade said, discarding the body of the drained Poseidon. “Let's get the hell out of here before–” His face twisted in pain, and something punched through his chest–
A knife blade. Big as his hand.
“NOOO!” I shouted.
Wade spun, turning on the figure behind him, an invisible man highlighted by the blood spray coating his blade. My husband raised his hand and the invisible man lost his grip on the knife, which slammed sideways into his chest and threw him backward as though it were rocket propelled; I heard the crack as the hilt rammed his sternum and drove him across the river, legs pinwheeling. He hit the far embankment with a light crunch and then fell, splashing into the river.
“Wade – Wade!” I shouted, grabbing him as he stumbled. Blood was coursing down his back and his front.
“Fly us into the water,” he said, motioning to the river. “Quick.” There was a distant whistling noise over the sound of the infinite number of soldiers whooping and hollering behind us as they advanced to attack us again.
I grabbed him and leapt into the water, and it parted for us as we dropped toward the riverbed. It flooded back in behind us, forming a small tunnel, and I flew us forward, up the river, accelerating.
We made it all of a hundred yards when the world shook around us like it had fallen into the sun. It felt like the planet split, like hell itself was belching up from beneath the surface. I looked up and saw flames, nothing but flames, coursing over the surface of the water above.
“Keep going,” Wade said, grunting. I had his hand, and was imagining River, imagining Alannah, and channeling their Persephone healing abilities into him even as I steered us down the water tunnel he was creating for us.
Away from the destruction of Guangzhou. Away from the bomb that Fen Liu had just dropped on us.
Away from the people she'd killed – her own people – in a mad effort to kill us.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Zhang
He didn't get to the surface right away, and it was fortunate that he did not.
When he slammed the blade home into Mr. Wade, Zhang had missed slightly. He'd struck a rib, had it deflected from the heart, which is what he'd meant to get.
That had resulted in him getting slammed by the knife hilt – Wade had magnetic powers now? Someone should make a note – and thrown across the river into the concrete retention wall of the riverbank opposite where they'd been fighting. It had hurt an appropriate amount, getting sandwiched between concrete and a knife hilt. He'd had at least a rib broken in the process, if not more.
But that had been nothing compared to what had followed.
It felt like an atomic bomb had gone off, and perhaps it had. Orange, glaring light shone on him through the darkened waters, lighting up the night like the city's neon had been turned to its maximum setting.
Zhang had stared at it in its quiet glory, even as it had swirled and crawled over the surface of the water. He didn't dare go up, captivated by the beauty and the horror.
How many men had he just ordered into Guangzhou to spearhead this attack? Thousands. Thousands of soldiers.
And now they were just...gone.
His mind strained, but his lungs were quiescent, and he stared, feeling the pain in his chest from the rib and the lack of breath until the brightness of the orange glow faded. It was seconds that felt like years, and when he came up to the surface...
...The fires burned.
He could barely tell that Guangzhou had stood there, because looking now where it had been before he'd been thrown into the river, what remained was mere twisted girders and melted slag. Where pavement had been, bubbling pools of molten asphalt now stood, and all about him lingered the smell of terrible things burning.
Zhang gasped, and he didn't know he was gasping.
For Guangzhou – city of eighteen million – was a smoking wasteland, like something out of the horrors of World War II.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Sienna
We came out of the river five or more miles down, somewhere in the suburbs, and promptly shot into the air. Wade's breathing was normal, his skin perfectly healed where the knife had penetrated. I know because I checked feverishly to be sure while he stared into the middle distance as we hovered there, a few hundred feet above the earth, and he surveyed the damage and I did everything I could not to.
“I think Fen Liu just...” his voice trailed off.
“Are you all right?” I asked. I knew he was. I just didn't want to contemplate the other thing, so instead I wicked away the small amount of water clinging to us from our high-speed escape down the water tunnel. It had been almost like some sort of amusement park ride, skimming beneath the surface, watching the flames dance above for the first mile or so.
And the horror. The horror I was still keeping at bay.
Under a field of darkened stars, the city lights spread out to that singular space of clouded darkness in that distant spot miles from us, where a mushroom cloud denoted fallout. Debris, ash, human remains all rained down on what had been Guangzhou not a minute ago. A city of millions reduced in an instant to a field of devastation, mass murder on a scale I hadn't seen...ever, really.
I gagged, wretched, and threw up my protein block right there in midair. Wade held his silence and kept his hand on my back as I did so.
When I finished spitting and rinsing with water pulled from the air, I looked away from the destruction I had wrought, and said, “We should get out of here.”
“Yeah,” Wade said, solemn and quiet. He slowly turned about in the air, and picked a bearing north, back the way we'd come. With my hand in his, he flew us away from the most destruction I'd ever seen in my life.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Fen Liu
“The bomb detonated precisely on target,” Defense Minister Guoqiang said, very businesslike in all this, though there was a small tremor in his voice. “It was released as intended, via a teleportation portal a few hundred feet above the earth and landed less than sixty meters from where Nealon and Wade were last observed engaged with our forces.” He hesitated. “It will take some time before we are able to confirm the kill...if ever.”
Fen Liu cocked an eyebrow at him. “Are you some sort of idiot?”
He hesitated. “I...what?”
“Are you an idiot?” she asked, leaning forward. “Are you blind? Do you deny the reality of your eyes in favor of the wishes of your heart? I only ask because I want to know what sort of fool I'm dealing with – a blind one, a delusional, or a self-deluded one.”
He sputtered. “I don't–”
“We saw them dive into the water before the feed was cut by the brightness of the blast,” Fen Liu said, feeling as though she were dealing with children, and explaining somewhat slowly for that reason. Part of her wished to scream, not because of the failure – things sometimes went wrong, occasionally very horribly, because of a last-second twist of fate, such as your quarry killing your rear guard and leaping into the river to escape just as you dropped the largest bomb in your arsenal upon them. It happened. Time and chance had their say upon all things, and in this case, their roll was merely unlucky.
But to deny the reality of it? The observed reality, simply because you wished you could have accomplished what so many before you had not? That was for idiots and children. And Fen Liu was neither. She was intent on killing Sienna Nealon, which meant if this plan had failed, she would need another, and an opportunity to employ it. Neither would be served by tricking herself into believing the thing she wanted done was done.
“We require contingency plans,” Fen Liu announced, for it was obvious as hell to her. “Get your people together, get your troops into staging areas, and ready yourselves. We will reconvene within the hour.”
She turned off the videoconference during a blizzard of grunted acknowledgments, and then immediately called the Minister of Public Security. “We need to control the explanation for the events in Guangzhou. Put the blame on Nealon. Tie her to it via her previous use of a nuclear weapon on our military base outside Changsha.”
“Yes, Premier,” Jianjun said, chins squishing as he nodded, and Fen Liu cut him off before any more could be said.
For what more needed to be said? It was a worthwhile gambit, employing the bomb. It hadn't worked, but no matter, she'd blame the destruction on Nealon, turning a disadvantage into an advantage. This was the advantage of controlling the information flow in a country. The message was hers to deliver, and anyone attempting to counter it was reduced to word of mouth attempts. Even that was becoming more difficult, with the social credit score allowing her to isolate undesirables, this rabble that talked treasonously amongst themselves. Having people carry phones everywhere was forcing them to wiretap themselves. And they had to do it, of course, because to buy a train ticket, to buy petrol, to merely walk down the street and get food you needed a phone with an app.
Every phone had a microphone, and a camera, and could listen to every word said in its presence. It was a dream that Chairman Mao could not have imagined achieving, putting a spy like that in every home. And the people paid to have them! Privacy died with a whimper, not a bang, and total control of the populace didn't inch closer, it surged into her grip. Power over the people that she could not have imagined in her run as Empress was now here, within her grip–
And it hadn't taken nearly the time or effort. Just a lifetime of maneuvering in the halls of the CCP. A few people sacrificed along the way had greased the wheels.
People like Zhang. A regrettable loss, but she'd been growing weary of him. He'd been more appropriate as a lover for a minister, not the Premier. Her promotion had come after she'd already taken him into her bed. And certainly, there were some positives to the experience.
But like with all the others, his ambition didn't quite match hers, and she didn't feel like advancing him further; it felt a bit like she was carrying him at this point, and she hated that. Weakness in any form repulsed her. It always had.
Which was another reason why she was not happy. She stared at the cloud hanging over the ruins of Guangzhou and frowned. Sacrificing a city? This was hardly her first time doing so. She'd done it before, in days of old, and in the recent past, too.
No, as usual, she'd find her best way through this mess and come out in a stronger position. Nealon might have dodged her attack, but she was trapped in China now, and like a rat in a nest, she'd poke her head out again. The trick was, this time Fen Liu would need a better strategy, or be quicker on the bomb. She knew which she preferred...
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Lethe
She stared at the light on the horizon, through the pelting rain. They were on the fifteenth floor of a concrete and glass tower that had been completed on the outside, but not on the inside, and Lethe was staring at the fading brightness glaring against the clouds.
“Huh,” Chen said. “That's in the direction of Guangzhou. I wonder what happened?”
She shared a look with Hades, who definitely knew. But neither of them said anything. They just chewed on their anxiety, worrying that the bomb might have actually found its target this time, and stared into the night as the flash faded.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Zhang
He crawled out of the river and into the falling ash. It smeared against his wet clothing, finding a place to stick there, draping him, becoming his outerwear.
Zhang had no personal connection to Guangzhou, but still...Zhang considered himself a patriot. And he was looking upon the utter destruction of a Chinese city.
Worst of all...he knew it wasn't Sienna Nealon, his putative enemy, who'd resorted to such measures as annihilation of cities. She'd been annoyingly circumspect in conducting her war. The general public might not know that, but Zhang did. That was the privilege of being let into the highest circles, he knew how the war was going – and wasn't.
He knew that Sienna Nealon had stolen every single nuclear weapon China had. That what had just been turned loose here was probably one of the new CL-20 bombs, with more destructive power than any previous explosive. He didn't fear fallout, didn't fear that the ash coming down on him would irradiate him into nothingness.
“An act of fratricide,” Zhang muttered to himself.
There was nothing left here but the melted girders and mere hints of concrete buildings that had once stood nearby. Molten steel flowed like a river, as though poured straight from a foundry onto the street, when in reality it had been...perhaps a car? Zhang wasn't ever sure.
The river behind him was black, already turned ebony with all the ash pouring into it. Fires glowed and lit the world around him like some underworld hellscape, and the heat seemed to bake his skin.
Still, Zhang sat there, and fished for his phone in his pocket. It was Chinese military issue, and not beholden to cell towers, all of which had surely been wiped out nearby. He stared at it, wondering if he should call Fen Liu...
...Or simply sit here awhile longer.
He decided on the latter, or let it be decided for him. Either way, he sat there, in silence, listening to the ash fall, the fires crackle, and distant sirens howl...
...And contemplated the death of more of his countrymen than had been lost in many, many years.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Sienna
We landed down the mountain from where we'd been before; or maybe it was another mountain. It was far from lights, far from people, and we dropped down in the darkness, the silence between us thick as the distant rumbling of Guangzhou's demise.
“Say something.” Wade spoke, and I could see him silhouetted in the moonlight that slipped between the clouds.
I stood there, the trees gently rustling above me, and stared up. Clouds, clouds, more clouds. No stars, just the eerie white light of the moon. “What's there to say?”
“They just destroyed a city to try and get you, Sienna,” Wade said. “That's not your fault. It's a measure of Fen Liu's fear.”
“Doesn't mean those people aren't dead,” I said. “Intentions aren't worth shit, Wade. I may have intended to come to China to end this war by decapitating the dirtbag Chinese government, but guess what? It's still in place. It survived my annihilating Zhongnanhai because Fen Liu survived, and she'll just keep reviving it because she's a coward and smart and she knows to hide and wait me out. My time is up.”
I could see his brow furrow in the shadows. “What do you mean?”
“They're going to blame it all on me,” I said. “I've seen this movie before. They always blame it on me. Even though it wasn't nuclear, even though they did it themselves, doesn't matter. They're going to blame me.” I checked my phone; it was smashed flat, little pieces of plastic tinkling and falling off in the moonlight. “Great. I'm cut off from Sierra.”
“Maybe,” Wade said, and I could see him fiddling with his own phone. A brief spark of light emitted from his fingertips into his phone, and then he shook his head. “Yeah, mine's got a knife hole through it. Do we have any extras?”
“Not on me,” I said, plopping down on the ground. “I had Lethe carrying extras, and Jian had a couple. I got nothing.”
“Don't say that.” Wade shuffled over to sit beside me. “You don't know exactly how this will play out.”
“A city is in ruins,” I said, and I couldn't even hide the fact there were tears streaming down my cheeks. “Millions dead. And it's at least partly my fault. I knew Fen Liu was evil, and I knew she did terrible things when cornered, and yet – still–”
