Chapter 29 #2
The cobra grew, shimmered, and again the man stood before me. “There was a field,” he said, taking my wrist in his grip and lifting the glowing thread to shine between us. “You made a field, and it fastened upon your light. Burning your fingers in the process.”
Cold cramped my wrist, rising to push the slight pain away.
“It had to have been something else,” I said, even as I knew it wasn’t.
“Pluck, I haven’t been able to hear the universe echo in my thoughts to weave a field since Thoth broke my wrist. I am listening for it now, and it’s not there. No echo, no weave, no field.”
My eyebrows rose, and I met his gaze. “But I did hear it echo in yours,” I said softly.
Pluck let go of my hand, eyes wide. “You wove a field with the echo in my mind, not yours?”
Hope raced through us both. Pluck looked at the ceiling, and then his hand flashed out, finding my free one.
“Try it again,” he said, his words echoing in my mind as if they were my own.
Eyes closed, I exhaled to bring the weft of the universe into play about my hand. As before, there was no echo in my head with which to harness it, and the dark matter tangled and knotted like Darrell’s silk on her loom.
Until Pluck strengthened his presence in my mind, bringing with him the ringing of the cosmos.
My breath caught as his fizzing shifted, and I watched with my mind’s eye, unbelieving as the echo within Pluck wove through the weft between my hands, arranging it, ordering it, giving it structure, tuning it as he once showed me how to tune a stone of moldavite. It was something I couldn’t do anymore.
But together we could.
Cold ran scintillating lines through my core, an icy, fractured branching until my very fingertips tingled with dark matter in a hazy, not-there existence.
It was Pluck, the edges of the shadow phasing in and out of reality.
Behind it, I could feel his awe as he sensed the mass that made me a humming, burning substance, the molecules that I was made of caught in a dance of attraction and repulsion that was stronger and more ancient than the universe itself.
Almost…we forgot that we had a reason to escape as our thoughts twined, cool and calm, and certain as we found a new reality, a new balance.
You can do magic. You are whole, Pluck thought, the idea spiraling through my mind as if it were my own. Make it yours. You can.
We can, I fizzed, a drowsy lassitude of a faultless connection filling me. It was the perfection found between sleep and wake and it was mine. Ours.
My lips twitched in a smirky smile as I willed the field filled with unorganized dark matter to the ceiling where the vault’s sealed intake valve hung in a metal and glass shroud. All I had to do was shift one electron from here to there…and…
Ah…Pluck thought, his sharp warning flicking through me as the entire field of unorganized energy snapped into a tight state that hung for one spin of an electron…and then explosively fell apart.
Too much!
A thunderous boom shook the room, throwing me to the floor.
I gasped, unable to hear it. My ears rang, chiming in tune with the universe.
The floor shook with an unheard sound of impact, and I squinted past Pluck’s shadowy form covering me in protection to the huge chunks of glass suddenly half-embedded in the floor in a dangerous circle about us.
My light was gone, but the faint glow of moonlight lit the room, shining on the last of the glass shards still falling.
Are you okay?
I didn’t know, and I blinked as Pluck dropped away to coalesce into his human form. Brow furrowed, he stood over me. Glass coated the floor, shifting to catch the moonlight when his not-quite-there feet moved.
Petra, he thought again, his lips moving in time with it, and I put my hand in his offered one, letting him help me stand.
“I can’t hear anything,” I said, neck craned and tears threatening when I looked up, relief spilling into me as I saw the stars past the ragged edges of the broken vault. I had utterly destroyed it, blowing away not just the intake valve but the lung above it, too.
Lock us in a vault, huh? I mused, thinking this time I would be thrilled to take the blame for the destruction.
Perhaps it was a good thing that Thoth had damaged every major vault in a fifty-mile radius and they would have to be rebuilt.
This was intolerable. Every vault from here on out would have a shadow valve for a quick escape.
If we survive the next few days, Pluck thought, a faint buzzing in my ear accompanying his moving lips. My hearing was coming back, and my hand slipped from his.
“We will,” I said, and Pluck dropped his head, glass shards tinkling as his hazy feet phased in and out of them.
“Pluck, we will,” I promised, and he met my gaze when my surety slipped among his doubt, curling around his worry like flame and turning it to a cold ash.
“If you can get me out of this hole, that is.”
His lips quirked into a smile and he glanced at the broken ceiling. “Are you good with heights?”
“You mean like flying?” I said, even as my flicker of angst was quashed by his memory. He was soaring over a night-dark forest, black wings silver in the moonlight, but there were two threads of joy twining through it, his and another’s.
“I’d like to show you,” he said, his mood hesitating when chunks of cement pattered down.
I followed his attention to the ceiling, my lips parting at the trio of faces staring down at us through the ragged hole. A combat hat and the outline of a rifle showed against the lighter darkness of the sky. It was night. We’d been down here an entire day.
“Ms. Grady?” a masculine voice shouted.
Pluck and I had just blown a hole through an impregnable vault. Some guy with a gun wasn’t going to faze me. “Ah, yeah?”
The irritating buzz of a military drone became louder, and I jumped, bowing my head when a white-hot spotlight from it slammed into Pluck and me.
The shadow darted for the line of darkness, but I stayed where I was, tired, hungry, thirsty, and really glad that someone was up there—even if it was the militia.
“Hey, you mind toning the light down?” I called, and Lev’s laugh fell over me like a balm.
“Damn, girl!” Lev shouted, and more glass pattered down.
“I should have known you’d find a way to bust out.
We would have opened it up sooner, but we estimated you had another twenty-four hours of air and we were afraid we might cut you to ribbons if we simply, ah, bombed the place. Hang on. We have a lift.”
Green eyes fixed on mine from the darkness, Pluck’s head cocked as he looked at the enormous hole in the ceiling and the new hum of activity. They’re going to want a lot in return if you let them believe they saved you. His eyes closed in a long blink. You saved yourself.
We saved ourselves, I thought back, moving to stand with him when someone shouted at me to move clear as the lift was lowered.
“Thoth couldn’t have caught everyone,” I added, and my ankle went cold as Pluck wrapped a tendril about it.
Guests of the militia or not, we’d find out who would believe us that Thoth was behind the destruction of St. Unoc’s vaults, and then Pluck and I would start a change that would last a thousand ages whether the university or militia liked it or not.
The fool yeth of a shadow had made the tool of his own destruction. Who was I not to use it?