Strikeforce (24 page)

48

I arch my head to the sky, craning my neck to see if I can make out any details. They're gone. Both of them. They might not be coming bac
k.

I move to a sitting position. My body feels like it's been crushed under the weight of an entire meteor. I cough, which is incredibly painful. Broken ribs, maybe. Matigo's attack hit me with seismic force. Worse, I hadn't been expecting it.

As soon as my gaze moves back to the scene in front of me, I notice a pair of Drifters—no,
three
of them—shoot into the sky. At first, it looks like they're retreating from battle. Going to find reinforcements, maybe.

Then, as I watch them disappear into the stratosphere, I realize where they're headed.

They're going to help Cassius.

Thank god.

No sooner do they disappear when a dark figure drops into the center of the circle.

Matigo doesn't even take a moment to breathe or recharge. He hits the ground with the force of a Skyship and steps forward. Blackness pools from his face to reveal his features.

He may have fooled me before, posing as my father, but there's no mistaking him now. His twisted, hideous expression makes a mockery of my dad's character. His grinning mouth opens wide, like a lizard's, ready to boast a victory that's all but guaranteed.

“One down,” he says, and leaves it at that.

I can't respond. Even if I could form words, it would only kill time that I desperately need. Instead, I spread apart my arms and call forth Pearls, one from each side of me.

I send them forward at a blistering pace. Matigo doesn't have a chance to defend himself before I break them.

Twin explosions detonate on either side of him. Before the energy can drift into the battle around us, I curl my fingers and force it right at his body, hitting him with hundreds of jagged jolts of Pearl energy.

He staggers back. Steam comes off his shoulders. It hurts, I can tell, but it doesn't kill him. Why doesn't it kill him?

I keep the Pearls coming—two more, exploded and funneled toward him with the same desperate ferocity.

He sends forth a coil of Ridium, trying to hit back. It doesn't reach me.

I could keep this up, Pearl after Pearl, but after the initial blast, the explosions don't seem to be doing as much damage. It's keeping him at bay, but I need something that will destroy him. Forever.

Several soldiers swoop in on either side of us, trying to take me out while I'm distracted. It won't happen.

I guide streams of energy toward them. An afterthought, almost, and they're blasted away, lying unconscious in the dirt. This is a battle between Matigo and me. It's always been, even if I wasn't aware of it.

Come back, Cassius.

It's all I can think, even as I'm fighting for my life. I shouldn't let it distract me, but I can't help it. I wait for the Drifters to come down, bringing my brother with them.

Nothing.

Matigo continues to throw everything at me. I keep him off-balance, lobbing great waves of Pearl energy at him. Every few moments, one of his attacks breaks through, forcing me to shift from offense to defense. The more times I have to do that, the closer he approaches.

The sounds of battle rage all around us. Our once-strong circle of protection has broken into a vast crowd of chaos—Drifter fighting Drifter, human fighting soldier. There's no clear way to tell which side is winning, if such a thing even exists in a battle like this.

I try to block it out as easily as I did before, to avoid the thought of my friends being slain around me. I see bodies fall out of the corner of my eye, but I can't put faces to them. For all I know, they could be Avery. Eva. Skandar.

No. I can't think like that.

Matigo hits me with a cannonball of Ridium. It flies from his hand like a dark Pearl and connects with my right shoulder, sending me staggering back into the dirt. I steady myself, but not before a second attack blasts into my chest.

This one's too much. I fall backward, hitting the ground with a painf
ul thud.

In seconds, he's on me, crouched above my body like a snake ready to bite. His hate-filled face is all I can see now, staring down with a mix of pride and pity.

He leans closer. “Say goodbye to your planet.”

I venture one last glance at the sky, hoping to see Cassius. It's empty.

Matigo raises his arm in the air. I watch Ridium begin to spike around his fist, creating a jagged, skull-crushing weapon. I've got seconds before he brings it down on me.

I pull the energy from around my body, grabbing anything that I can shoot at him. There isn't much left. I need more Pearls, but they're too far away. If I had a minute, I could locate them and bring them closer, but Matigo won't give me such a luxury. It's kill or be killed.

The spike continues to form above me. Apparently, he's not content with murdering me in the quickest, simplest way. He wants to make it terrifying. He wants to create unbearable fear before he does it.

It's working.

I gather energy, forming a protective shield over my body much like the dome the Drifters concocted at the start of the battle. It won't protect me forever, but it might buy me a minute while he tries to break through. The problem is, it takes unbelievable concentration to keep it strong. I can't defend myself
and
find new Pearls. It's a losing battle.

His fist comes down on the energy just as it's finished forming. I watch the shield give way slightly. The Ridium pounds inches from my face. A couple more hits and I'll be done for.

Cassius
. I whisper the word in my head.
Come back. I need you.

The images of my dreams come back to me. Cassius disappearing, the fire working its way inside of me. Then I think of Matigo's words—how desperate he'd been to have Cassius and me together so that he could kill us both at the same time. He's horrified by what we can do.

Which begs the question: what
can
we do?

I wish more than anything that I could find out. But Cassius is gone. I might as well fold up and join him. I'm not strong enough on my own.

I wince as Matigo attacks again, breaking the shield faster than I can rebuild it.

Cassius's fire. It's been the one reoccurring element in all of my dreams.

Then it occurs to me. All these months, every time Cassius and I fought—together or against each other—he never turned his flame on me. And when it got close, when he saved me from the Authority foot soldier in the Nevada bunker, the fire didn't do any damage to my body. It's a reaction to my own energy, just like my parents' recording told me. And if the fire's a reaction, that means my body must be able to understand it. To channel it.

Maybe that's why Matigo's scared of the two of us, side by side. Maybe that's how we'll defeat him.

The realization lifts my spirits briefly, but it's not enough. Had I imagined this possibility twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn't be in my current situation. As it stands, a half-baked theory isn't going to do me much good at all.

Cassius is gone. There's no sign of him coming back. And I've got all of ten seconds to figure out how I'm going to live through this.

49

This was how it would be now.

Cassius let himself succumb to the thought for a moment as he drifted through space, on the very edge of Earth's orbit. He needed a moment to panic, to release all the emotion he was feeling, before calming himself once more and thinking rati
onally.

He'd studied space. He knew of inertia—how an object would keep floating in one direction unless some force pushed it elsewhere. No amount of flailing around would turn his fortune. He was a small fish in the middle of an ocean. Everything around him looked the same. Stars on three sides. The blue glow of the Earth emanated over his shoulder, though he couldn't see it directly.

Still, the blue surprised him. The planet seemed nothing but brown when standing on the Surface. From space, he imagined, Earth's problems looked much less significant in the grand scheme of things.

The Ridium over his face kept him breathing, though he knew he'd run out of air eventually—sooner rather than later. Anything he did, he'd need to do fast.

Fire. It always came down to fire. He thought that if he could conjure a torrent big and strong enough, the sheer force from it might propel him downward, back into Earth's gravitational pull. But what would happen when Earth starte
d pulling? Cassius didn't like the idea of becoming a human comet.

Sure, the Ridium suit protected him to a degree—even kept him alive at the edge of space—but would it be able to survive burn-up as he fell to Earth? More pointedly, would Cassius be able to will it to happen? His concentration had fractured. His willpower was shot.

He began to stoke the flames inside of him. They came slowly—a tinge of heartburn at first, lowering into his gut.

As he worked, he started to think of life back on Earth. He didn't mean to, but his thoughts strayed to his childhood, to all those years before he considered Pearls anything beyond an incredibly lucky energy source.

He tried to push the memories away. This wasn't the appropriate time to get caught up in nostalgia—emotional or otherwise. But up in space, with the stars his only audience, he couldn't will his mind to focus on anything else.

It started with Madame. From there, the floodgates opened.

He remembered her, younger than she'd been when she died—less fragile and worried. He remembered following her around on weekends, watching how she dealt with people. Interactions had always been thinly veiled power struggles. She hadn't ever admitted defeat back then. She was always able to frame a setback as a victory.

She'd saved him.

That was it. No matter what struggles they'd been through, no matter what betrayals she'd pulled, in the end she'd saved him. Standing there, at the edge of the Academy's docking bay, was the least selfish Cassius had ever seen her. Thinking back on his life, he couldn't remember a single time she'd sacrificed anything for the benefit of somebody else. She'd asked for more than her fair share of favors from others, but she'd always been top of the pack. Served. Never serving.

Still, it had always been in her eyes. That was what had kept Cassius coming back, time after time. It didn't matter how she'd treated him. He'd found that connection as a small boy and never let go. Ally to adversary and back again—that connection had never frayed, not completely.

Now, what was there to do? Who was there to matter to him?

He couldn't bring himself to care about Haven the way he'd cared for Madame. He knew it was selfish, and maybe she'd instilled some sense of that in him, but everything—from the Drifters to his real parents to the stars in front of him now—felt so distant.

Fisher.

He was it.

He was the thing worth fighting for. Since the rooftop early in the spring. Cassius would have killed him then, had he had the chance. He would have gladly watched his brother fall from the building and taken the Pearl as his prize for service to his government. Selfish. Again.

But even then, though he hadn't understood it fully, he'd felt that same connection. It was like, even though they were so diametrically opposed to each other, Cassius could
understand
him. Fisher was everything that he was not. The good and the bad. The flip side. In a way, they were both half a person, only whole when they worked together.

He was surprised to find tears streaming down his cheeks. The thoughts, the stars, the silence … it all came together for him at that moment. A purging of sorts. A rebirth? He wasn't sure, but something had changed. Something big.

The fire continued to build inside him, strengthened by the emotion funneling through his body. If someone like Madame could sacrifice, Cassius could do more than that. He was stronger than he'd made himself out to be. Strong physically, yes, but there was more to it than that. And he and Fisher? Together, they were stronger than anything. He knew that now. Understood it.

He stretched his arms above his face, tucking his knees into his stomach. He made himself as small as possible, rationalizing that if he limited the surface area he was creating, the fall wouldn't be as damaging. It was a gamble, no matter what he did.

The fire began to stream through his system, up to his shoulders and down his arms. He remembered the first time he'd exploded—so sudden and uncontrollable. It seemed as if it had happened ages ago. He had to remind himself that it hadn't even been a year.

The heat teetered on the edge of his fingertips, ready for release.

Just before he closed his eyes and triggered the energy, two pairs of hands wrapped themselves gently around his shoulders. He glanced in both directions to see a pair of Drifters—one on either side. Their green Pearl glow lit up the darkness around him. Their grip was soft, but firm. He knew instantly that they were only there to help him.

The fire retreated inside of him, stored for later. He fell limp in their arms—let them carry him downward, back into Earth's gravity.

They were like heavenly creatures, the pair of them. Ascension, but in reverse. He shut his eyes and relaxed as they took him back to Earth.

This was the beginning of the end. That's all his mind would allow him to think. He was heading back to end things. No excuses. No distractions. Only fire.

He was the Catalyst, after all. It was time to set things in motion.

50

My shield of Pearl energy breaks. I roll sideways. It's stalling, at best.

Matigo's pulverizing fist of Ridium hits the ground so hard that it leaves a visible mark indented into the earth, a reminder that all it will take is one good swing and I'll be done for.

While he's off-balance, I fire back with a jolt of energy. It knocks him to the side, freeing up time for me to get to my feet again. But I can already see his next attack coming. Violent whips form from between his shoulder blades, ready to wrap around my stomach and pull me apart.

Then, I sense it.

Something comes down on us from the sky—a concentrated amount of Pearl energy, already broken.

I glance above me. A pair of Drifters descend to the ground, carrying a dark figure with them. I recognize it instantly as Cassius. He's alive. They saved him.

I allow a glimmer of hope to rise in my gut. For a while there I thought for sure that I'd lost him, that I'd have to find some way to do this on my own.

The Drifters carefully set him down several yards from us. I can tell right away that he's ready to blow. His hands tense at his sides, shaking with added energy. The blackness around his face peels to reveal an expression of gritted teeth and sunken, defiant eyes. He looks almost feral, standing with his back slightly hunched over, breathing heavy.

Matigo turns, freezing for a moment as he tries to work out what to do next. Attack us both, or pick one off first? He thought he'd finished Cassius. I can tell from the look in his eyes that he expected this to be over. It's the first time I've seen him the least bit shocked. I savor the moment, even if it's just for an instant.

I lock eyes with Cassius. He raises an arm, ready to attack Matigo before he can make any move to defend himself.

“No!” I reach out a hand, though I'm not nearly close enough to stop him physically. “Cassius, don't!”

Sparks begin to ignite along his fingertips. His eyes narro
w, flashing me an incredulous look.

I motion toward my chest. “Me, Cassius! Straight at me!”

Matigo stomps on the ground, lifting a swell of Ridium that streams toward us at staggering speed.

Cassius pulls back, confusion in his eyes.

“Trust me,” I continue. “This is how it's meant to be! This is what we are. Hit me with the fire … everything you've got!”

He hesitates for a moment. It's nearly long enough for the Ridium to slam into me.

But then, with a deep heave, he lets loose.

A
torrent of fire, stronger and more concentrated than I've ever seen before, barrels toward me. My first instinct is to dodge it—to flinch and run—but that's what the old Jesse Fisher would do. I can't go back to that. I don't have the luxury of hi
ding.

I swallow. Wait for it.

Everything freezes. It's as if the world has stopped for a moment in anticipation of what's going to happen next. I mutter a prayer under my breath.

The fire hits me square in the chest. I expect pain. I expect to be burnt faster than I can put out the flames, to feel my body searing away from me.

Instead, I feel a surge against my skin, like standing on a beach as a huge tidal wave rushes over me. It's not hot—not even warm, really. It defies such an easy description as temperature.

It's just like my dreams.

My body absorbs the fire. I step back, finding it hard to stand straight against it. I lock my knees and establish a foothold on the ground. The flames are so bright and so close that I can't see much around me. I don't know what Matigo's doing. He could be attacking, but if he is I don't feel it.

As the fire continues to funnel into my body, I start to feel bigger. It's not like I'm growing physically, but something inside of me is expanding. I'm not even sure it's something I
knew was there in the first place.

This is for my parents. This is for Mr. Wilson and Agent Morse and August Bergmann and Madame. For everyone the Authority has touched, both on Haven and on Earth.

My eyes close. Suddenly, I can sense everything around me. It's like the world used to be folded up into a ball and suddenly it's unfolded, revealing everything inside and around it. My body becomes a shell. I'm much bigger than it.

Without realizing it, I start drawing Pearls from everywhere. They speed at me from every corner of Earth, from the skies and stars and oceans. My consciousness zooms out until I can see the entire world, all at once. Our little circle in the middle of the Fringes seems ridiculously small. Matigo, in comparison, is an insect.

I watch an army of green Pearls collect at the edge of our atmosphere, bunching together in a soup of trembling orbs. They come at us, pulled by invisible strings bringing them to our exact coordinates.

My mind snaps back. My consciousness is inside my body once more. My eyes open.

I see Cassius through the fire. He keeps it coming—one steady, uninterrupted stream of flames. It's like he's not even doing it anymore. Something's been set in motion between the two of us. A cycle.

The Pearls pull closer—hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Every last remaining bit of energy works its way into my corner, supporting me in my next move.

Then I notice something. My eyes meet Cassius's and, for the first time since we've met, I see a blankness in them, like he's checked out of his own body. I can tell that it's different from what's happening to me.

I glance farther down his silhouette, which is barely visible through the oncoming fire. The closer I get to the ground, the more it fades. His head and shoulders are clear, but his legs … they're disappearing.

My concentration fractures. “Cassius!”

I look back at his face. His expression is nearly unrecognizable. His mouth hangs open, empty. I watch his pupils begin to disperse into the whites of his eyes until they're gone for good.

“Cassius, no!”

But it's too late. He can't hear me.

A few seconds more and there isn't anything left of him. I watch his body disintegrate, pulled forward by the fire in bits and pieces until he's nothing but energy. Nothing but fire.

Without him, the stream trickles down. The last of it hits my body with a powerful force, knocking me back. I've got no time to process what's happening before my eyes fly shut again.

The network of Pearls fills my consciousness once more. My hands lift and bring them toward me. I tilt my head into the air and open my eyes to watch them circle down on us—a twisting, DNA strand of green. Everything stops around me. Fighting is useless in a time like this. No one resists the urge to look into the sky. The energy's so bright, it's practically blinding.

Cassius, where are you?

My body does the work for me. My vision increases again, looping and climbing until I can take in the entire country. I see the Flood of Ridium pulsing from the coasts of America. I get a read on every last Shifter. I mark their coordinates—a list of points so incredibly long that under any other circumstance, I'd have no way of remembering them all.

Cassius. He's helping me do this.

Somehow, even if I can't see him, I sense this to be true. I'm not alone. I'll never be alone again.

I lock onto every member of the Authority, like a missile targeting its prey. My hand twists above my head, fingers tensing. Matigo is nearby, but I sense he's no longer a threat. This maelstrom of Pearls above me—it's otherworldly. Unprecedented.

The hairs on my arms pull into the air, threatening to leave my body completely. My skin buzzes with such a rumbling energy that I'm convinced I'm going to disintegrate just like Cassius did.

A thousand Drifter voices speak to me. Whispers from the Pearls above join together until the words don't even sound like words. It's a wave, coming down at me. Feeding me.

Three.

I start the countdown.

Two.

This is for Cassius, wherever he is. This is it, the true meaning of the Key and Catalyst. We're stronger together. We always have been.

One.

My hands fly back. I collide my back with the Earth. A hurricane of wind cycles around my body. The world blurs into a sea of incongruent colors.

The explosion is deafening.