Cal follows behind me. I feel his warmth from yards away. He burns the catwalk behind us, letting it melt, cutting us off from the others. When we reach the opposite door, the one marked “COMMAND,” Cameron gets to work on the switch panel. I can do nothing but stare, glancing between Kilorn and my brother, memorizing their faces. Ketha, Nix, and Darmian run back into the block, sprinting from the onslaught they can no longer hold back. Bullets follow, pinging off metal and Nix’s flesh. Again, the world slows, and I wish it would stop entirely. I wish Jon were here, to tell me what to do, to tell me I made the right choices. To tell me who dies.
A hot, almost scalding hand takes my cheek, forcibly turning me away from the rest. “Focus,” Cal says, glaring into my eyes. “Mare, you’re going to have to forget them right now. Trust what you’re doing.”
I can barely nod. I can barely speak. “Yes.”
Behind us, the cell block empties. Ahead, the switch sparks. The door slides open.
Cal pushes us both through, and I land hard on another tile floor. My body reacts before my mind can, and lightning sparks to life all around me. It shatters my thoughts of Kilorn and Shade, until all that remains are the command center across the hall and what I must do.
Just like Cameron said, it’s a triangular room of impenetrable, rippled diamondglass, filled with control panels, monitoring screens, six bustling soldiers, and the same metal doors as the cells. Three in all, one set in each wall. I run to the first, expecting it to open, expecting the command soldiers inside to rise to the occasion. To my surprise, they keep to their chairs and stations, watching me with wide, fearful eyes. I bang one fist on the door, enjoying the pain that shoots through my hand. “Open up!” I scream, like that can do anything. Instead, the soldier closest to me flinches, jumping back from the wall. He too has a captain’s badge.
“Don’t!” he commands, holding out a hand to still his fellow officers.
Overhead, a siren screams to life.
“If that’s the way they want it,” Cal mutters, moving to the other door.
A slam makes me jump, and I turn to see great granite blocks slide into place, replacing the metal door we just came through. Cameron smirks at the control panel, even patting it fondly. “That should buy us a few minutes.” She gets to her feet, knees cracking. Her face sours at the sight of the command center. “Bleeding fools are scared,” she growls, and makes a very rude hand gesture more suited to the alleys of the Stilts. “Can we reach them through the glass?”
In reply, I turn my gaze on the monitoring screens. They explode in rapid succession, showering the soldiers in a spray of sparks and broken glass. The siren screeches to a low whine, then cuts out. Every piece of metal inside the command room jumps with electricity, frying like eggs in a pan, making the soldiers cluster in the center of the room. One of them collapses, clutching his head in a gesture I now recognize. His body rocks in time with Cameron’s clenching fist, fighting wave after wave of suffocating ability. Blood drips from his ears, nose, and mouth. It isn’t long before he chokes on it.
“Cameron!” Cal barks, but she pretends not to hear him.
“Julian Jacos!” I shout, banging on the glass again. “Sara Skonos! Where are they?”
Another soldier drops, howling.
“Cameron!”
She shows no signs of stopping. Not that she should. These people imprisoned her, tortured her, starved her, and would have killed her. Revenge is her right.
My own lightning intensifies, bouncing inside the glass box, forcing the soldiers to cower from its purple-white wrath. Each bolt crackles and spits, blasting closer and closer to their flesh.
“Mare, stop it—” Cal continues shouting, but I barely hear him.
“Julian Jacos! Sara Sko—”
The captain, now scrambling across the floor, throws himself at the wall in front of me. “Block G!” he screams, slapping his palm on the glass a few inches from my face. “They’re in Block G! Through that door!”
“That’s it, come on!” Cal growls. Inside the command module, the captain’s eyes flicker to his fallen prince.
Cameron laughs, high and clear. “You want to leave them alive? Do you know what they’ve done to us? To everyone here, your Silvers included?”
“Please, please, we were following orders, the king’s orders—” the captain pleads, ducking to avoid another arc of lightning. Behind him, Cameron’s second victim curls into himself, succumbing to her silence. Tears cling to his lashes in crystal drops. “Your Highness, I beg for mercy, your mercy—”
I think of the little girl in the cells. Her eyes were bloodshot, and I could feel her ribs through her clothes. I think of Gisa and her broken hand. The bled baby in Templyn. Innocent children. I think of everything that’s happened to me since this fateful summer, when a dead fisherman began all this trouble. No, it wasn’t his fault. It was theirs. Their laws, their conscription, their doom for every single one of us. They did this. They have brought this ending upon themselves. Even now, when it is Cameron and me destroying them, they beg for Cal’s mercy. They beg to a Silver king, and spit upon Red queens.
I see the prince through the rippled glass. It distorts his face, and he looks so much like Maven. “Mare,” Cal whispers, if only to himself.
But his whispers cannot stop me now. I feel something new inside myself, familiar but strange. A power that comes not from blood but choice. From who I have become, and not what I was born as. I turn from Cal’s warped image. I know I look just as twisted.
I bare my teeth in a snarl.
“Lightning has no mercy.”
Once, I watched my brothers burn ants with a bit of glass. This is similar—and worse.
While the individually sealed cell blocks make it difficult, almost impossible, for prisoners to escape, they also make it that much harder for the guards to communicate with each other. Confusion is as effective as lightning or flame. Guards are loath to leave their posts, especially with rumors of the king around, and we find four buzzing magnetrons arguing in Block G.
“You heard the siren, something’s wrong—”
“Probably a drill, showing off for the little king—”
“I can’t get command on the radio.”
“You heard them before, cameras are malfunctioning, the radios are going too. Might be the queen messing around again, bloody witch.”
I spear a bolt through one of them to get their attention. “Wrong witch.”
Before the metal catwalk can drop beneath me, I grab onto the bars to the left of the door, holding fast. Cal goes to the right, and the bars turn red beneath his flaming touch, melting straight through. Cameron stays in the doorway, a light sheen of sweat across her brow, but she shows no signs of slowing down. One of the magnetrons topples from his retracting perch, clutching his head as he falls three levels to the concrete floor. It knocks him out cold. Two left.
A hailstorm of jagged metal screams at me, each piece a tiny dagger meant to kill. Before they can, I let go, sliding down the bars, until my feet hit the slight ledge of the cell below. “Cal, a little help!” I shout, dodging another blast. I answer it with my own, but the magnetron dips, stepping into what should be midair. Instead, his metal moves with him, allowing him to seemingly run through the open atrium.