Into Darkness

21

Was that low sound a chuckle? No, not quite. More like a noise of satisfaction, nearer to one of Liesel’s grunts.

At the thought of Liesel, Lu’s concentration snapped. She whined, high and soft, in the back of her throat. The man shushed her softly, murmuring something in a mellifluous language she didn’t know, but somehow, impossibly, understood.

Sittu, heleti. Salamu itti manaz pani.

Sleep, My Lady. You’re safe with me.

You’re safe with me.

She managed to drag her lids open long enough to see his face above her, a dark, featureless oval, only the shine of his eyes visible. Then, in a brilliant burst of color that flared the night sky into a prism of sapphire and gold and green, the first of the Thornemas Day fireworks erupted in the distance with an echoing boom, and his face was illuminated.

One side of his face was illuminated. The smooth, unmangled side.

The rush of recognition felt like stepping off a ledge and free-falling. Like remembering something she’d forgotten, something important, dizzying relief and elation and the startling urge to laugh and cry at once.

“Magnus,” she whispered.

His lips parted. His dark eyes grew fierce.

Then the fireworks faded, her lids slid closed, and Lu sank back into the waiting darkness.

When next she awoke, Lu was certain she was dreaming for three reasons. One, she couldn’t hear anything. Two, it was cold. Not just cold. Freezing. The teeth-chattering, body-shaking, curl-into-a-ball-and-want-to-die kind of cold . . . the kind Lu had never felt in her life.

And three, she was flying.

Pain was still carving molten pathways along her nerve endings, but her mind was slightly clearer, the pressure in her chest slightly less. She was able to lift her head to try to get a better look at her surroundings, but her stomach violently rebelled against that idea, sending the acid bite of bile into the back of her throat. She clenched shut her eyes again, but the one brief glimpse had been enough.

She was lying on her back on an unforgivingly hard surface, covered by a heavy piece of canvas, wedged between a wall and the back of two seats. A man was strapped into one of the seats with his back to her, a pair of headphones over his head, his big hands gripped around a wheel that protruded from a console forested with a million colored buttons and digital gauges. From this angle, he could have been anyone, save for the breadth of his shoulders, the thick, corded muscles of his forearms that showed beneath his rolled up shirtsleeves, and the hatched scars marring his knuckles. There was that hair, too, thick and inky black, its shine like sunlight on water, so different from any she’d seen before.

Never seen sunlight on water, she thought, still groggy. How would I know?

In front of him was an expanse of curved glass. Far beyond that in the shimmering distance loomed the jagged peaks of a mountain range, emerald and dusky gray in the morning light.

Which made no sense whatsoever. If it was daylight, everything should be tainted red. Crimson, crimson everywhere, like an endless sea of blood. Even those clouds that wreathed the highest peaks were all wrong. They weren’t the roiling, angry thunderheads lurking always over New Vienna, casting bloody shadows over everything below.

These clouds were soft and fluffy, white as goose down. They almost looked cheerful.

Lu opened her eyes again, blinking into the brightness, desperate for another look at those happy clouds. Could they be real?

As if sensing she was awake, the man turned his head to look at her, and Lu saw him in profile.

Not a dream after all. In this light, his scarred face was even more startling.

“We’re almost there,” said Magnus. His voice sounded scratchy and tinny, as if coming from far away. Why couldn’t she hear him right? She lifted a hand to her head and felt a bun of cold metal over her ear; she wore headphones, too.

“Protection. For the noise,” he explained, seeing her bewilderment. Those dark, dark eyes met hers, and the snap of connection felt like a plug shoved into a socket.

Electric. Humming. Complete.

He held her gaze for a moment, then turned away, the corners of his lips tugged into a frown.

“Almost where?”

Either Magnus didn’t hear or didn’t want to respond, because he didn’t answer. He didn’t turn around again.

SIX

“A PHONE!” screamed the Grand Minister. “BRING ME A f*****g PHONE!”

For the hundredth time since being dragged from the rubble of the Hospice and lifted to the gurney that had rushed him to the hospital where his badly burned body—what was left of it from all his previous entanglements with the Aberrants—was now being hurtled down a corridor on the way to a surgical suite, his screams were ignored.

Goddamned do-gooders.