Elves Invasion

79

“How do we get more?”

“All the Hive’s watchtowers are stocked with crossbows.”

Brick thought of the platforms soaring high above the city streets. “But who can get to them except the Hive?” he asked. Ivan shrugged as if say he could only do so much. “Does the pesticide work at least?”

“Who knows? We can’t test it without alerting the Hive,” Ivan said with a fatalistic laugh. “Come. I need help.”

Brick rolled up his sleeves. “Grace could wake at any moment. I’m on borrowed time,” he said.

“We all are,” Ivan replied.

Brick was just about to put on a pair of gloves, when he heard a low hum in the air and felt all three of the Workers clinging to him suddenly lift off his skin. He looked around and noticed that all the Workers in the room were leaving. He and Ivan ran out of the room, hearing startled gasps, and pushed their way past the confused masses and out onto the street.

The sky had gone dark. Brick looked up. Every inch of airspace was covered with Warrior Sisters. They were all flying toward the perimeter wall simultaneously. Ivan ran back inside, Brick close on his heels, both of them taking the stairs inside the villa two at a time until they reached the top floor. Ivan pushed open a door to a room that was empty except for a single staircase that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. They emerged on the roof of the villa and looked out past the wall.

An army stood on the field of flowers, ready for battle.

Ava felt Juliet calling to her after she finished claiming another queen.

Ava, Mia has taken her army to Bower City without us. They just disappeared.

Isaac’s brow furrowed in question at Ava’s expression. “Mia didn’t wait for us,” she told him.

I told you I was gathering more forces, Ava called out to Mia in mindspeak.

I gave you all the time I could, Mia replied. Join me now or the war is lost.

Ava turned to Isaac. “What do I do?” she asked him.

Over the course of the day they’d managed to claim almost twenty nests, but it was only a tiny fraction of what they needed. Isaac pulled his lower lip through his teeth, his eyes scrambling across the ground as he thought. Finally, he shook his head.

“We don’t have a choice. Dividing our forces would be suicide,” he said. “We have to go.”

“But we don’t have enough soldiers,” Ava said, holding her hands out helplessly.

Isaac was calm. He looked at the Woven Ava had just claimed and smiled to himself. “Then I guess it will come down to which side has the strongest queen,” he said. He took her hand and kissed the backs of her fingers and warmth traced up her arm. “It’s time, Ava.”

Ava nodded. She was exhausted. She had never felt more awake.

Isaac struck flint against steel and sent a spark into the mulch at Ava’s feet. As the fire rose she closed her eyes to gather up all of her claimed.

She started with the insect Woven. Seeing through the pale lavender tinge of the speaking stone near Richmond, she summed all fifty thousand of them. Using the same speaking stone, she moved to her raptors, only one thousand pairs of wings, but they would be invaluable to fight the flying Hive.

Her mind dove into the fast-flowing stream of the speaking stones, heading north. She saw green and stopped to gather the nine thousand of the tank-like Pride and the thirty thousand of her human claimed waiting at the camp. Carrying all of them with her, Ava vaulted across mountains and valleys, her mind swimming across the miles of the continent to where Pale One and the twenty thousand warriors of the Pack were waiting in the flaxen-yellow hue of the Ocean of Grass.

Ava turned her mind, now nearly a hundred thousand strong, through the scorched red of Death Valley, up over the thin pink and rarefied air of the rocky mountains, and into the misty pearlescent throbbing of the westernmost speaking stone. Brick was standing right next to it. He called out to her.

Ava, has the war begun?

Yes, Ava replied. She played the vibration of the redwood grove and jumped her army. I’m here.

“She’s here,” Brick said, his eyes searching past the army at Bower City’s gates and into the distant smudge that was the redwood grove.

“Obviously,” Ivan remarked dryly. He looked down at the orderly ranks of disciplined soldiers. “She didn’t bring enough.”

“That’s not Ava,” Brick said, frowning with confusion. “That’s the other one. The Salem Witch. Mine is coming.”

He craned his head to look up at the Hive as more of them streamed into the air from the city. The din of their wings rattled his bones. He saw Warrior Sisters rising up from the restricted zone. Brick wondered whether the antidote had ever made it to his family. Whether it even worked.

“There,” Ivan said, pointing to a figure being carried to the ramparts over the main gate. “That’s Grace. They’re building her pyre right there.”

Brick stared at Ivan. “They’re really going to burn her?”

“Oh yes,” Ivan replied as a sinister memory stole through him. “I hope that witch of yours is as strong as she seemed. I once saw Grace spend two whole days and nights on the pyre.” He looked down at his hands and Brick could have sworn he saw flames l*****g inside Ivan’s eyes. “We chopped down every tree. Burnt all the switch grass. We even threw our clothes on the fire. And through it all she burned. Screaming. Laughing.” When Ivan looked up again his eyes were sunken and haunted. “Grace lives for the pyre.” He clapped Brick on the shoulder, shaking himself. “I have serum to distribute and you have crossbows to steal.” A thought occurred to him. “This would be a lot easier if we were stone kin.”

Brick was struck by the offer. “It would be an honor,” he said.

When they touched each other’s willstones Brick was surprised to find Grace was there at the forefront of Ivan’s thoughts, but not Grace as they both knew her now. Brick saw a backdrop of dusty mining towns, Zuro-drawn carriages, homesteaders in broad-brimmed hats and gingham prints, and Grace as a girl with long plaited hair, a buckskin dress, and beaded moccasins.

“That was a long time ago,” Ivan said, drawing Brick back to the here and now. “Come. We have a lot of work to do.”

They went back downstairs, stopping in the room where Grace had learned to spirit walk in the hopes that they could help Red Leaf, but the shaman was gone. They continued on down to the lab where the forced calm had given way to pandemonium. Mala was nowhere to be found. The table she had been manning was tipped over, and vials were scattered all over the floor. People were pushing and shoving their way into the lab to grab handfuls of the serum and rush out. Brick tripped over something and realized that he was stepping on a body.

Brick pulled the inert woman out of the main flow of the mob and checked her pulse. There was a welt the size of goose egg on her neck. She was dead from a sting.

He looked out a window. Workers were swarming outside, coalescing into great clouds and descending on the most panicked people. When the cloud flew away and moved on to the next person, the dead body left behind would be covered in stings. One sting would be enough to kill a person in ten seconds, but the Workers were overreacting as much as the people were. Their hive was being invaded and they were turning on anything that was not them.

“Everyone, calm down,” Ivan shouted, holding up his hands, but the mob was past listening.

“I need good climbers,” Brick shouted amid the rushing, grabbing confusion. Ivan called out two men by name.

“Avery! Michelson! Come with me,” he ordered.

Two tall young men stopped trying to hold back the tide of people and came forward. Ivan had them gather up as many darts full of pesticide as they could carry and led them out the back way and through the twisting passages of the villa. There were no Workers indoors. They were all out on the streets, swarming.

They stopped at one of the many service storerooms. Ivan went to the dusty shelves littered with fishing poles, skis, tennis rackets and all other kinds of recreational equipment. He pulled down a large duffel bag. Inside were ropes and grappling hooks for climbing, which he distributed between them. Brick, Avery, and Michelson looped the thin, strong rope over their shoulders and put the pesticide in the duffel bag.

“Brick,” Ivan called after them as they ran. Brick stopped and looked back. “Good luck.”

Brick nodded. You, too, old friend.

When they hit the street, they saw that the situation had deteriorated further. Bodies lay here and there in the streets. Swarms of Workers were expanding and contracting in the air in a murmuration. They were chasing people indoors, and anyone left outside would be targeted.

Brick’s raiding party ran to the nearest watchtower. Storm clouds started forming into a wheel over the city and the sky turned an ominous shade of pewter. Grace was on her pyre, and her power was building. As the raiding party pounded down the streets Brick felt a sharp sting on the back of his hand.

He started counting to ten.

Ava opened her eyes. She stood among the redwoods. Isaac was still clasping her hand.

Her army shifted out of the shadows of the ancient giants, their faces stark with awe. Jumping was a new experience for most of them, and even for those who had done it before, the sight of the towering redwoods was enough to strike them dumb.

Tell them to calm down, Isaac said in mindspeak.

Ava did her best to explain, and to those claimed that couldn’t understand, she did her best to comfort them.

Now. Tell them not to kill one another, Isaac added.

“Right,” Ava breathed. She could feel all her claimed balking at being thrown together like this, and it wasn’t just the ranch hands against the Outlanders anymore. The Pack hated the Pride. The Pride hated the raptors. The simians hated the humans. The insect Woven felt nothing, but everyone hated them. This wasn’t an army. It was a melee waiting to happen.

What have I done?

Remind them why they’re here, Isaac said in mindspeak. Get them to focus on fighting the Hive.

Ava felt a clamor rising in all of them. They would not accept this. The hatred between them went too deep.

“Wait,” Ava whispered desperately to herself. She could feel control slipping away. Grumbling, shouts, and hisses rose up from the ranks. She could force them to work together. Control them. Bend them to her will. That would be the easiest way. That would be what Grace would do, maybe even what Mia would do, too.

Ava was neither of those people, and she decided she never would be.

She ran to the highest point she could find—which happened to be the back of one of the raptors—and climbed up with a silent appeal to him to help her do this. She steadied herself against the raptor’s enormous head and shouted what she only dared whisper before.

“Wait! Listen to me. You aren’t enemies,” she called. “Hear what I have to say before you all tear one another apart!”

“Listen,” Isaac yelled.

“Listen!” Joyce echoed, backing him up.

Every face in the crowd turned to her. She looked out, taking it all in, searching for a place to start. Her claimed. They were all so different. They were together, but she still needed to find a way to unite them. She took a deep breath and began.

“I come from a world where people never know what it’s like to be someone else. We can only imagine what it feels like to walk around in someone else’s shoes. That’s what we say, by the way—walk around in someone else’s shoes—which is so small compared to what you can actually do here.

“In my world we don’t know what it is to live a different life from the one we were given, to be a different race or gender, forget about being a different species. In my world we fear anyone who’s different. We think those people are our enemies and that they want to take what’s ours or destroy our way of life. We think like that because, well, what else are we supposed to think? We can’t know someone else’s mind like you can.

“Things should be so different here. But what do I see? The same division, the same fear, the same us-against-them mentality that I see back in my world. Walltop hates the Outlanders. Why? Because the city isn’t large enough for everyone and Outlanders are always trying to sneak in illegally. Outlanders hate the Woven. Why? Because the Woven took their land. The Woven hate the humans. Why?” Ava paused, knowing this was the missing puzzle piece. “Because a human enslaved them and forced them to be killers. A human created them in order to tear this world apart.