Shade of Exposure (Three)

Six

Six:

What do a pair of exiles, and their two hanging friends opt to do after being ejected from an immortal city hidden under the largest city on the planet? We go to school, of course. New York is so accustomed to snowstorms that our university was hardly impeded by four feet of snow.

Plows were working around the clock to make the streets as clear as possible for traffic. Despite all the low windchill factor and the terrible visibility, life carried on in the frosty city. Sometimes I wondered how a city so synonymous with an apple could be placed so far north. New York was a artificial city, built on an artificial land along the waterfront. Such a monstrosity scarcely resembled anything naturally birthed in life.

Somehow, the beacon of the nexus of humanity was something so artificial that it could scarcely even be called a landmass. Considering the correlation between New York, and Hidden City, the similarities were striking. Two cultures existing almost atop and beneath one another, and they still resemble each other, even given the massive gap in technology.

“What are you think about? Please tell me you’ve changed your mind and we can abandon this foolish errand.”

Sky inquired of me, and she seemed almost frustrated just to think about a certain blonde beauty. Nadia was a perfectly preserved touchstone to a lost breed of Nordic-like female with traits that seemed to have vanished from the passage of time and the mixing of the gene pool.

While it is nearly improbable for a mortal to even become an immortal, Nadia is a result of ancient alchemy which the Architects used to perfect the practice used to transmute their flesh with later. Humans had served as a template for perfecting the process. The exact details of this ominous and potentially lethal transmutation were shrouded behind layers of mystery. If Nadia knew the process by which she was crafted, she was not talking about it, and beyond the Architects, she was the only remaining person in existence who survives to tell the tale.

“Nothing like that, just thinking. You, eat something, you’re all hangry, and we’re not even at the club yet.”

I told Sky, and Clarke dared to snort in amusement. While he talked to Sky as casually as I did, he usually didn’t dare to piss her off, not when she controlled how much physical attention he was going to receive. Not that I was at all interested in playing the third wheel to that peepshow.

“You know, I am thinking roasted shade sounds like a tasty snack to tide me over until I can feast upon bitchy reaper.”

Sky sassed at me, and I smiled and shook my head.

“You’d never eat me.”

I said dismissively, and Sky frowned at my certainty and she huffed and asked, “How could you possibly know that for certain? My mom has eaten stranger beings than you.”

Sky said, not at all sounding like Hannibal Lector robed in a pretty high school-aged meat-suit.

“Because you are what you eat, and you would basically be stuck like me, for all time.”

I said in a dire tone, and Sky nodded, conceding to my point.

“Ok, so, I’d never eat you.”

She concluded, and I nodded my head at her approving of her ability to follow my logic to its natural—or not so natural—conclusion.

“Whoa, what the heck is that?!”

Clarke exclaimed, and my senses surged with his sudden fear. I could see through his eyes even before my sight flew upon the horror ahead. The club tucked away behind Time Square, was smoldering ruins and blistering flames.

“So, I’m thinking word’s out with the Architects, or else something else entirely different managed to breach Nadia’s runes and expression wards.”

I said, and Sky shook her head in dismissal of that thought.

“Nope, I would know if the b***h’s wards could be penetrated, because I would have killed her by now.”

She said in a tone, not at all suited for the sweet innocent face speaking such heavy visceral truth.

“How in the hell is the fire still raging like that, it’s like minus, fifteen out!”

Clarke exclaimed, and I muttered, “Expression.”

Before Kerry could finish speaking the same answer just a half-second behind me. My eyes were open to the blaze, the conflagration was wholly unnatural, and it seemed to have veins of life-force feeding into the seeming wildfire, stirring the heat higher and the pressure to a nova-like force.

Amid the conflagration, I could see two figures.

“s**t, Hannah, mask, they still don’t know what you look like.”

Sky exclaimed, and she fished out my mask from her backpack. I frowned questioningly at the thing and what it was doing in her possession. Sky seemed to prepare for every eventuality ahead of time. Despite her seeming lackadaisical teen angsty appearance, Skylar was a deep planner and a meticulous calculator. She had already planned out moves in advance, and contingencies for her contingencies. No detail too small, and no possibility left to chance.

“Did you expect we’d be here?”

She rolled her eyes and hopped out of the car even before it stopped. A flurry of activity commenced in a flash, as the girl was gone, replaced by a massive dragon, and over a dozen reapers were leaping onto her scaly flanks.

I put the mask into place, and I followed my sister of choice onto a battlefield right in the open. Humans were scarcer today, but this was still part of Time Square, so people and TV crews were out. Whatever was left in the bag, was now out, along with the very grump immortal cat.

“Clarke stay out of this.”

I warned, and he glared at me, as Kerry skidded to a stop. They slid along the icy road for about ten feet as I leaped into the fray, diving not for the dragon, but Nadia, pinned down, her clothing seared clean and her body burning beneath the flames that seemed to be slowly eroding at her layers of defense.

“Oh, look, it came to me of its own volition, what are the odds?”

An excited and manic sounding voice cheered in self-praise.

The being was confusing to behold, it was a painfully beautiful metallic sculpture, to ascribe the only possible words I could, to the figure. The skin of metal, and eyes as black and lifeless as the darkest fathomless reaches.

“I see your taste in men still sucks.”

I joked to Nadia, who looked at me, considering me with wide eyes. She didn’t speak my name, and I was confident she did not even allow herself to think it. Not if this being was an Architect. The expression rolling from it like waves was every bit my equal, possibly more. I could feel all the force of the metal man’s power, there were no hidden limits. He was terrifying, and he was like a roaring siren system in an air-raid. Nothing subtle, he was the harbinger of a terrible foe so chaotic in their order they nearly suffocated the entire universe under their tyranny.

“You know, I was just looking for a few kinks, but then I end up ass-up over a flame. Bully for me for letting my guard slip.”

She joked, and I smirked beneath the mask.

“I’m not even going to bother with some ridiculous dialog, let’s just settle this, so I can go rub lotion on her burns.”

I blushed beneath my mask, not fully exploring the ramifications for that statement until the words had cleared my verbal quiver. Nadia seemed suddenly more interested in her continued existence now.

“Impetuous little whelp, come to me lass.”

He said in a tone that made my gut turn and suddenly wish to release its contents onto his dark sculpted metallic muscles.

I drew my short katana, the same katana that had announced Nadia as an ally to this being.

“I’m not sure how you managed to slip my geas, but I will have you in chains once more, little dove. We’ve yet to break you even fully. I will ensure that all you have endured over the entirety of your life, was but a reprieve compared to the hell I shall forge for you, Nadia.”

The sadistic promise bespoke the most unimaginable megalomania and sadism I had ever experienced. The vileness seemed to radiate from the being like the waves of flames rippling through the air.

What this Architect could not have anticipated, was that fire was one of my most familiar aspects of expression. More particularly, aether flames, cosmic fires that burned things out of all quantifiable existence. In some situations, this could be slightly more negligible in equal combat, but not right here and now. Not outside his natural element in a raging snowstorm.

I was careful not to tip my hand right now. I needed to get him further from Nadia. I needed to hit him with enough force that I might risk killing her outright, despite how similar her energy is to mine.

“Ok, let’s just skip the cliché villain lines.”

I said, and I rushed forward, and I let my expression propel me faster. The amused look of the metal-man lasted until his left hand contacted the expression enchanted blade, and he pulled back as quick-silver liquid dotted my blade. His black eyes were wide in shock and horror. He roared in an abominable sound of agony.

“How is this possible?! Nothing of this dimension is powerful enough to cause me harm! I am the perfection of flesh!”

Nadia dared a smirk of amusement, seeming to read into what I was already planning.

“Now!”

She yelled at the top of her lungs, and I felt her full might of expression roar to life pressing against the flames holding her small naked body to the ground. She rose to her knee and she blasted out in her utter defiance, choosing to fight and die, rather than to submit.

“Enjoy hell, freak.”

I sneered at him, and I flung my hands out as I rushed within a few feet of the Architect, and I funneled aether flames through to the human realm and blasted a pillar of silver fire across his chest and down his legs.

He screamed for what seemed to be an endless expansive torturous moment of primal terror before the metal began to turn to dust. I frowned at the ease with which I had vanquished him. I felt the power he had once possessed not vanish, but surge to some unknown location following across the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, past the British Isles, and somewhere into the main body of Europe. I was not sure how my senses followed the power trail so far, but it did.

“That was just an avatar, Xane is hardly so easy to handle in person. You’re lucky he did not design to taint his true form with the mortal world.”

Nadia explained, and her voice sounded weak, even despite the bravery she displayed. All around us, two scaly bodies flew at lightning speeds around screaming, and hollering reapers.

“Do you think you should help them?”

Nadia asked, and I stepped closer to her, and I pulled my leather jacket off, and I draped it on her slim shoulders.

“Nah, they need the stress release, besides, Sky was pretty hangry, she might still bite me.”

I explained, and Nadia nodded and winced, as she allowed me to stroke my hand gently along her back. I could gaze upon her perfect beauty, but somehow my eyes were drawn down the gate of her soul, through her eyes. We’d not spoken in weeks, and I was only now realizing just how extensive my ache for her had become.