Chapter 8 #2
I wanted to ask him why he even bothered making himself an option, but a bell rang out behind us. The guards in the Gatehouse had been alerted by the gunfire. Lights flickered on the walls, beaming out over the water as they searched for the source of the sounds in the Grand Canal beyond the wall.
“Spotlights,” he whispered, as if the patrol guarding the perimeter could hear him over the whir of the engine. As if I couldn’t see for myself the white beams of light. “There are barricades in the canal ahead of us. They’ve probably raised them already. You’ll have to disarm them.”
He tossed me something, and I caught it on reflex.
The Forge die.
“You’re giving me this?” I asked, hesitant. Yesterday, he’d nearly killed me for it.
“You’re good at wielding Forge abilities. Might as well make yourself useful.” He sat beside the tiller and winked. “And I’ve seen how you drive.”
“The cart crash wasn’t my fault,” I reminded him.
He kept the gear low, quiet, creeping into the open as the cover of the building fell away, letting the tide do most of the work. “Perhaps. But I think you’re very lucky you’ve gotten this far.”
“Oh yes,” I hissed in a quiet whisper. “So lucky. I’m on a boat with a lunatic, after being kidnapped from prison by the Magister’s goons and accused of murdering the Governor, whose bloated body rolled out my cart after an outsider broke the wheel.
It’s all very fortunate for me. The favor of fate, some would say. ”
“It could have been much worse.” He shrugged a shoulder, then glanced behind us.
A large spotlight swooped in front of us. There would be guns up on the walls, ready to fire as soon as we were spotted—but they weren’t pointed in our direction yet.
I spotted the barricade that the outsider had mentioned, a claw-like metal barrier protruding from the water. But even as I reached out to move it with the power of the die, I realized that it was already submerging beneath the water.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I murmured. The outsider only lifted a brow, keeping his face hidden. “The gates are opening. There must be someone coming through.”
“Fate favors you again, Ace.”
I huffed a breath through gritted teeth. “Stop calling me that.”
“No. Now hush, before someone hears you.”
We remained unnoticed as we silently moved through the small, enclosed dock. Once we were through, another boat—the one that was supposed to be coming through—crept toward us.
Two coppers guarded the front and rear, with a prisoner sitting between them bound in chains that glowed green. They raised their lights at us, eyeing us hard.
“What the hell is the welcome party for?” one of the guards in the boat called to the wall.
“Missing prisoner,” another answered from above us. “We heard gunshots coming from this direction.”
“They know,” the outsider growled. He opened the throttle, and the little motor roared.
The narrow gate had us scarcely passing the other boat.
The glow of the prisoner’s chains pulsed as we neared, illuminating the profile of a man I recognized.
I knew the notch in his nose from looking at it across the operating table, the wrinkles below his eyes from years of straining in the poor light when he sutured.
His face was bruised, but his gaze was still sharp as he looked up at me.
They had caught Bernard.
The outsider leapt forward from his seat. In successive movements, he shoved me to the floor and shot the guard at the prow of the other boat, who was holding up a light. By the time I crawled back to my seat, he was already laying on the throttle again and gunning it down the canal.
I gripped the bench, the rim of the hull, anything to steady myself.
With the power from the Forge die, I felt the metal of guns on the walls shift to point our way.
I tried to lift a mental shield around us to redirect the bullets, but there wasn’t time.
Lead exploded against the lining of the boat.
The motor popped as sparks exploded off the back, sending us down a few gears.
The outsider made a strangled sound behind me. He must have been hit, but somehow, he maintained our course, even with a damaged engine. I peeled myself off the floor again to find him bracing his shoulder. A fortunate place to be shot, if there was one.
The guards on the walls were reloading, so I gripped the bow of the boat with one hand and the die with the other, focusing the remnant on the guns and the space between, filling the path between us and them with a wall impermeable to any kind of metal.
I’d never done it before—never needed to—but I was experienced enough to innovate with Forged abilities.
If I could pull elements of the earth like metal, shape it and twist it, then I could push, as well.
A chaos of gunfire erupted, and I felt each bullet tear into my field, pulsing a quake through my bones as the remnant caught and contained them. Nothing made it through. The boat barreled onward, disappearing around a bend that hid the Gatehouse from view and led us into the city’s slums.
The barrier had worked.
I pulled myself onto the bench seat across from the outsider. “I did it!”
Orange eyes slitted. “You missed one.”
I forced a tight smile. “Did I, though?”
He hit the throttle again, sending the boat lurching forward and me falling backward off the seat. I landed between his legs, forced to brace myself using his thighs or risk falling into… something else. A deep sound rolled from his chest—a laugh.
“Asshole,” I cursed him, slapping the inside of his leg before quickly pushing away. Heat flamed my cheeks.
His scowl softened. “You might as well stay down there. Someone’s following.”
I peered around him and noticed that the boat containing Bernard and one remaining guard was closing the distance behind us.
“Do you know the canals?” I asked the outsider.
“Not really. I’m just burning gas to get away from the bastards.”
I glanced around us, trying to place us on my mental map of the city. “Take the next split; stay left. We’ll lead them to the Pumps.”
“Remember, we’ll still need to find a way out of the Fissures… when we finally lose them,” he murmured over the buzzing engine.
“One problem at a time, Outsider.”
Bernard sat still in front of the guard, still bound by chains at his shoulders and his wrists.
Meanwhile, the guard tugged at his belt for his weapon.
I tried to summon a wave to veer them off course, but the enforcer used a shield conjured by one of the relics in his arsenal, protecting him from magical attacks.
“Just use a gun!”
He shoved his own into my hands, but I shoved it back. “No! I don’t kill people!”
“You smuggle dead bodies!”
“Exactly. They were already dead,” I reasoned for the hundredth time, trying to make sense of my crimes. I wasn’t a bad person. Bernard wasn’t a bad person.
“Yes.” The outsider laughed. The wind had blown back his hood, tearing through his silver hair. “I’m sure you tried very hard to save people when you made money off their bodies.”
My jaw crushed my teeth together. His words had found a way under my skin, burrowing as deep as a splinter. “We always tried to help them. And technically, they owed us. Can’t pay for a surgery if you’re dead—”
He took an abrupt turn, following my directions while trying to fake out the guard still pursuing us.
“I’ve experienced your kindness firsthand, Nina. Your surgeon, on the other hand…” His slow smile dug deeper wounds where his words had only pierced. “He definitely would’ve preferred me dead.”
“You seem to have made it out just fine.”
“Not without a threat to my life from the good doctor. I didn’t realize at the time he could actually make me disappear,” he murmured, picking up speed again. “Dr. Broussard wanted me to stay away from you.”
“You should have listened to him.”
His smile thinned. “How much farther?”
I turned to look ahead, catching the swinging sign of a tavern that had closed up long ago. “Almost there. Take the next split left.”
“Left? Where the hell are you taking us?”
He realized soon enough. The Pumps looked like the skeleton of a beast that had been starved and forgotten.
When the Architect disappeared, we were forced to use science to create and work and irrigate the never-ending canals.
These huge old pump houses were once the beating heart of the city, before steam engines and gas lighting and the slow introduction of electric motors.
After that, they had been left dilapidated and deserted.
Crime lords and their hired hands had made the Pumps their domain, building a district of their own among the ruins, before the late Governor burned the place down, leaving them without a home base.
Therell had set his city on fire just to keep control.
Some criminal elements still survived, but they now hid in the underbelly of the New City. The Cursed were the only syndicate still sinking their teeth into this part of the Continent, and the police—and the Magister—were determined to eliminate them as well.
Brick buildings were crumbling away, their faces charred from smoke.
The outsider slowed the boat to navigate the splintered remains of a pump station.
The canal widened, opening to let a portion of the man-made river pass around the turbine that still sat rotting in the water.
Behind us, the constable’s boat emerged with a spray of filth as it turned sharply to close the distance.
Bernard’s guard pulled something from his belt.
A gun, but one that looked different than his service revolver.
He pointed it into the air and shot a flare that drew a red line from his barrel to the sky, bursting above us like a star.
The piercing cry of the flare echoed into the quiet morning, calling his colleagues to the area.
“Just great. You got us cornered!”
“Not yet,” I snapped back. “He’s close now. We need to get rid of him.”