2 Avaline #2
I crouched over the dead Seeress and stripped her belt. The master keys came heavy and cold into my hand, iron worn smooth by years of turning locks on women like me. A blade slid out of its sheath. I stood.
The washroom was coming apart. Dust sifted from the ceiling. I turned to Row Three.
Lynnea had slid down the cabinet to sit against it, her knees drawn up, shaking.
Marisol had a broken shard of tile clutched in her fist and no idea what to do with it.
The Olinga twins had pressed themselves together, back to back, the way they slept.
Thirty women, all of them caught in the terrible narrow place between the poison in their blood and the impossible thing they had just watched me do.
“They’ll kill us for this,” Marisol said. Her voice cracked. “Whatever you just—they’ll kill all of us.”
“They were always going to kill you.” I said it plainly, because they’d earned it.
“Slowly. In pieces. Draining the gold out of your marrow a needle at a time until there was nothing left to hold your name.” I crossed the tile and crouched in front of Lynnea and took her face in my hands, gently, the way Phaelen never had. “Little bird. Look at me.”
She looked. Her pupils were blown wide with the morning dose, but somewhere behind the fog, something turned toward me the way it always turned.
“What am I?” I asked her.
“You’re—” Her throat worked. “You’re Avaline.”
“What am I,” I said again, softer, dropping into the low resonance that came up from somewhere older than this building, “underneath. What are you? What have they spent your whole life telling you you’re not?”
The word came out of her like it hurt. “...A wolf.”
“A wolf.” I pressed my forehead to hers. “You are not cattle. You are not a battery. You are not a bridge form or a resource or a good girl.”
I felt it then—felt the ice in my chest begin to fracture and my own dammed-up nature straining against its walls. Cold poured off me. Cold, and under it, something feral and enormous waking after twenty years of sleep. “You are a wolf, Lynnea. And today, we bite back.”
The magic bled out of me into the room. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried—my aura spilling out cold and vast and undeniable—and it found them the way it had always found them.
A compass turning. Dozens of heads coming up.
The drugs in their veins fought it and the drugs in their veins lost, because chemistry is a small and stupid thing next to what the Moon spun into our marrow, and one by one the women of Row Three stopped shaking and started listening.
“Weapons,” I said, and stood, and it was no longer a whisper.
“Pipes. Mop handles. Anything with an edge or a weight.” I pointed at the twins.
“Stay to the center, you hold the middle and you keep the younger ones moving. Marisol, my left hand. Lynnea, my right.” I turned the master keys over in my palm.
“We are not asking permission to leave. We are taking our leave.”
They moved. Goddess help me, they moved—thirty drug-slowed dormant women tearing the washroom apart for anything they could swing, and every one of them orienting on me. The crater in my chest that had pointed always and only toward a boy on a ridge cracked wider and filled with purpose.
We came out of the washroom into the sub-level hall as the red strobes began to spin and the ward began to hum, signaling to all the monsters in this place that we were escaping.
Three guards rounded the far corner at a run—young, panicked, reaching for weapons they hadn’t expected to use on the furniture.
I put my body between them and the flock without deciding to, the way I’d bumped Lynnea’s hip.
The blade in my hand knew what to do even if I didn’t.
I went low. I took the first one behind the knee and he dropped screaming, and I was already past him, and Marisol’s tile shard opened the second one’s cheek and Lynnea’s mop handle cracked across his wrist and his gun skittered away across the floor into the dark.
The third one looked at thirty feral women pouring out of a room he’d thought was a kennel, and he ran.
“Don’t chase,” I said sharply. I hauled Lynnea back by the collar before she could bolt after him. “We move as one thing or we die as thirty. Keep the middle tight.”
“Where?” Marisol was breathing hard, blood on her knuckles that wasn’t hers. “Where can we possibly go?”
I gestured down the hall. “Loading bay. East. It’s the only door big enough to move all of us and the only choke point we can hold.
” I pushed them down the corridor ahead of me, keys jangling, blade up, watching the corners.
“If the Second Saint returns, if you feel the air go thick and sweet—you do not fight it. You run past me. You understand? The Second Saint is a thing you cannot fight with a mop handle, and I will not have you try.”
One of the twins stepped forward. “You’d try.”
I checked the edge of my blade. “I got us into this, so that’s my job.”
We reached the loading bay as the compound gave a deep groan that dropped a rain of concrete dust across all of us.
I got them through the security gate—thirty women, packed into the reinforced space with its high ceiling and its steel-plated walls—and I turned the master keys in the gate behind us and heard the bolts slam home.
A wall of iron between my flock and the corridor. A choke point. A place to hold.
For half a breath, I let myself believe I’d done it.
Then the far end of the bay began to scream.
The great steel blast doors—the outer doors, the ones that opened onto the desert, the ones that should have taken a demolition crew a day to breach—began to spark along their seams. The metal groaned and buckled inward under something on the other side that had decided the fastest way in was simply through.
Sparks fountained where the locking bars sheared. Smoke curled through the widening gap.
Behind me the women went silent with terror.
The Arbiter’s Praetors. The Second Saint. My mind supplied it cold and certain. Or the First Saint, wearing that little girl’s grown-up face, come to finish what they started twenty years ago on the grass.
I did not run. I had nowhere left in me to run to.
I turned and I put myself in front of my flock, in the mouth of the choke point, and I raised Phaelen’s stolen blade in a grip that did not shake because I would not let it.
The cold poured off me. The frozen wolf under my ribs lifted her head and snarled, a guttural ruttle of a sound that came up my own throat and out of my own mouth, over territory, over what was mine, over a threat about to arrive.
Twenty years ago I had lain paralyzed and awake while they took everything, and I had not been able to lift a single finger.
Not today.
“Get behind me. All of you. Behind me. If they want you, they come through me first.”
The blast doors shrieked. The metal tore.
Let them come, I thought, and squared my shoulders, and bared my teeth at the smoke.
The doors blew inward on a cloud of ash.