She eyes him with steel annoyance, unaccustomed to taking orders from anyone but her father. Still, she sighs and trots off to do as he wills.
“What about me?” I ask, planting myself between Tiberias and Davidson. Both of them jolt, forgetting I was even here to begin with.
“Stay vigilant” is all Davidson offers, shrugging. “Unless you can lift a transport off the ground, there’s not much any of us can do right now.”
Helpful, I growl in my head. But the frustration is with myself. My ability is meant to destroy. It has no purpose right now. I’m useless, for the moment.
So is Tiberias.
He watches Davidson stalk off, his communications officer in tow, leaving us standing alone, our backs to the wrecked hulk of my transport. Adrenaline and electricity still course through me. I have to lean against the metal, my fingers knotted together to keep from twitching.
“I don’t like this,” Tiberias mutters.
I scoff, scuffing my new boots on the road. “Stuck on a cliff, half of the soldiers gone, transports ruined, raider attack imminent, and I didn’t get to finish my dinner. What’s not to like?”
In spite of our circumstances, he grins, his smile crooked and familiar. I cross my arms, hoping he can’t see me flush in the dim light. He stares at me, his eyes an intent, burning bronze as they trace my face. Slowly, his lips fall and the smile fades as he remembers our decisions. Our choices. But his stare remains, and I feel fire rise inside me. Rage and want and regret in equal measure.
“Don’t look at me like that, Tiberias.”
“Don’t call me Tiberias,” he shoots back, dropping his gaze.
I laugh bitterly. “It’s the name you chose.”
To that he has no response, and we lapse into uneasy silence. The occasional shout or metallic groan echoes across the mountainside, the only sound in the empty darkness.
On the zagging road above us, Evangeline, her cousins, and the gravitrons slowly leapfrog the all-terrain vehicles, moving the wrecks behind the transports that can still function. Davidson must have told her to preserve all the wrecks she could, or else she could just crush them all to dust and let the rest roll through.
“I’m sorry about before, in the armory,” he says after a long moment. He keeps his eyes on the ground, head bowed in shadow. But not enough to hide the cold flush across his cheeks. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I don’t care what you said. I care about the intention behind it,” I tell him, shaking my head. “I don’t belong to you.”
“I think anyone with eyes can see that.”
“Can you?” I ask sharply.
He exhales slowly, as if gathering himself for a fight. Instead he turns his head to look down at me. The glowing lights of the Hawkway cast jagged shadows across his face, emphasizing his cheekbones. It makes him look old and tired, a king for years instead of days. “Yes, Mare,” he finally says, his voice a low rumble. “But remember it wasn’t just me.”
I blink. “What?”
“You chose something over me too,” he sighs. “Many things.”
The Scarlet Guard. The Red dawn. The hope of a better future for the people I love. I bite my lip, chewing my own flesh. I have nothing to deny. Tiberias isn’t wrong.
“If you two are done,” Tyton says loudly, leaning down from his vantage point on the transport, “I think you’d both be interested to know there are people in the trees.”
I suck in a breath, tensing up. Tiberias puts out a hand quickly, touching my arm in light warning. “Don’t startle,” he says. “I’m guessing they have us targeted.”
Metal groans, and I jump beneath Tiberias’s fingers. His grip tightens. But it’s just the transports being moved.
“How many?” I ask through gritted teeth, trying my best to mask my fear.
Tyton looks down at me, eyes bright. His white hair gleams in the artificial light illuminating the Hawkway. “Four, two on each side. At a good distance, but I can just feel their brains.” Next to me, Tiberias frowns, the corners of his lips curving downward in distaste. “Fifty yards, maybe.”
I look past Tiberias, and he looks past me, both of us searching the shadowed pines as furtively as we can. I can’t see anything beyond our circle of light. Not the gleam of eyes or the flash of steel down a gun barrel. Nothing.
I can’t feel them either. My ability is nowhere near as strong or as focused as Tyton’s.
Farley catches my eye and approaches with a hand on her hip, the other still clutching her pistol. “You three look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says, sweeping her gaze back and forth. “Snipers in the trees?” she offers, as if she’s asking about the weather.
“Did you see them?” Tyton breathes.
“No.” She shakes her head. “But it’s what I’d do.”
“You can drop them, right?” I ask, nudging Tyton’s boot. I remember the electricons taught me about his ability. Brain lightning. Tyton can affect the electricity in a person’s body, the tiny sparks inside our brains. He can kill without anyone knowing. Without any trace.
He frowns and furrows his dark brows, a sharp contrast to his dyed hair. “I might be able to, from this distance. But only one at a time,” he says. “And only if they are raiders.”
Tiberias scowls. “Who else would they be up here?”
“I don’t enjoy killing people without cause, Calore,” Tyton replies. “And I’ve lived on these mountains my entire life.”
“So you’ll wait for them to shoot us?” The prince shifts slightly, squaring his shoulders so that I’m sheltered on one side.
Tyton doesn’t budge. As he speaks, a breeze plays up, carrying with it the strong, sharply sweet scent of pine. “I’ll wait for your magnetron princess to tell me if they’re holding sniper rifles or not.”
On the one hand, I agree with Tiberias. We’re exposed up here, and who else would be waiting in the trees, watching us scramble? But I understand Tyton too. I know what it is to pour lightning into a person, to sense their nerves sparking off and dying. It feels like a small death of your own, an ending you can never forget.
“Get Evangeline,” I mutter. “And tell Davidson. We need to be sure.”
Next to me, Tiberias huffs. But he doesn’t argue. He pushes off the transport, intending to stalk after Evangeline.
The breeze strengthens, playing across my face. Pine needles brush my skin, soft as trailing fingers. I try to catch one, but it dances off on the growing wind.
And it sprouts before my eyes, a sapling growing in midair. It spears a soldier before any of us can react.
The attack is not the storm of bullets we expected, but the spray of pine needles blasting in a strong, sudden gale. It catches Tyton head-on, tossing him off the wrecked transport. He rolls onto the road, head smacking against the pavement. He stumbles to a knee, then falls, oddly off balance. I throw up an arm to protect my eyes and drop to a knee as needles scratch across my exposed skin. Where they land, roots and trunks burst forth in curling, living explosions. The Hawkway cracks and transports heave, tossed by the forest growing before our eyes. My balance shifts with the road, and I fight to keep upright, bracing against the wrecked transport at my back.
Tiberias reacts without thinking. He tosses a fireball, charring the pines sprouting up around us as fast as they can grow. The ash swirls in the growing wind, obscuring the road lights, making my eyes water.
The air shudders with the sound of crushing metal and shattering glass. Evangeline and her crew are done wasting time. They flatten the wrecks that remain in the way, reducing them to solid puddles of iron and steel. The transports that still work roar, revving their engines as they lurch forward, fighting over pulsing roots and ripping branches. Evangeline leaps through the smoky air, climbing up onto a transport frame. Gunshots ring out, but the bullets fall to the wayside, tossed off by her ability.
Blue shields spring to life on either end of the Hawkway, tall and ethereal against the smoke and ash. Davidson controls each one with an outthrust fist. More shots sound, rippling over the shield. They can’t penetrate. The guns can’t reach us.