Chapter 19 The void
The red laser dots danced across my chest like fireflies, but I didn't feel the phantom heat of a coming bullet. I felt nothing. The second shard in my hand pulsed, a cold, rhythmic throb that synchronized with the first. As the two jagged edges touched, a spark of pure, colorless energy arced between them, sewing the glass together with threads of absolute black.
"Containment unit, advance!" the commander barked.
Four soldiers in bulky, matte-black power armor stepped out from behind the concrete pillars of the pier. They carried heavy, triangular shields that crackled with blue electricity Null-Shields. Behind them, a specialized drone hovered, lowering a metallic net woven with silver filaments designed to short-circuit the nervous system of anything with a pulse.
"Aria, get back!" Julian yelled, raising his hands. A weak shield of silver sparks flickered into existence around us, but the moment the soldiers' blue light touched it, the sparks vanished. Julian fell to his knees, clutching his head as the Null-Frequency hammered his brain.
I didn't get back. I stepped forward.
"You’re looking for magic," I said, my voice sounding strange to my own ears—hollow, like I was speaking from the bottom of a well. "But there’s no magic here."
The lead soldier leveled a massive canister-fed rifle at me. "Subject 0-Aria. You are under arrest for the violation of the Seattle Peace Accords and the harboring of Class-A Bio-Threats. Drop the artifacts or we will use lethal force."
I looked at the shards. The purple light of the virus was trying to escape the glass, reaching out like tiny, glowing tentacles toward the soldiers. They thought they were safe behind their tech. They thought they were the ones doing the containing.
"The virus isn't a bio-threat," I whispered, my fingers tightening around the re-fused obsidian. "It's a hunger. And I'm the only thing in this city that can feed it."
I stopped fighting the vacuum. I stopped holding the "nothing" inside the small box I’d built in my mind. I opened the door.
The effect was instantaneous. The rain didn't just fall anymore; it was pulled. The droplets curved in mid-air, spiraling toward me in a chaotic vortex. The air pressure dropped so sharply the soldiers’ helmets hissed as their internal seals struggled to compensate.
"Fire!"
Four rounds of high-velocity "Null-Slug" ammunition screamed toward me. In any other chapter, these would have ended me. But as they entered the five-foot radius around my body, they didn't hit me. They slowed. The kinetic energy was simply... eaten. The slugs fell to the wet sand like harmless pebbles.
I raised the two shards.
"My King is a statue again," I said, my eyes fixed on the commander. "My mother is a shadow. And you killed the only friend I had left."
I didn't throw the shards. I let them drink.
The purple light in the air—the broadcast frequency from the Space Needle—was suddenly dragged down from the sky. It looked like a literal ribbon of violet silk being sucked into the obsidian. The soldiers screamed as the power armor they wore began to crumple. The Null-Shields didn't just fail; the electricity was pulled out of the batteries, leaving the metal dead and heavy.
The vacuum grew. I could feel the pier groaning, the wood splintering as the physical world struggled to resist the gravity I was projecting.
"Aria! Stop!" Julian cried, his voice barely audible over the roar of the wind. "You're pulling too much! You’ll collapse the pier!"
I didn't care about the pier. I wanted the man who pulled the trigger.
I reached out a hand, and the commander was yanked forward as if an invisible chain had been wrapped around his throat. He hit the sand at my feet, his helmet cracking open. Inside, I didn't see a monster. I saw a terrified man with sweat-beaded skin and eyes full of a primitive, animal fear.
"Where is the third shard?" I asked. My voice wasn't a whisper anymore. It was a vibration that shook the very marrow of his bones.
"The... the Stronghold," he wheezed, clawing at the sand. "The High Priestess... she took it back to the King. She’s using it to... to bind him. He’s the heart of the hive now. If you break the shard, you break his heart."
The vacuum flickered. My heart gave a painful, frantic thud.
A trap. The Iron Weavers didn't scatter the shards to hide them. They scattered them to lure me into a choice. If I gathered the shards to save the city, I would have to destroy the one that was literally keeping Kael’s heart beating. To save the many, I would have to kill the King myself.
"Target escaped!" a voice crackled over the commander’s fallen radio. "The Void is unstable! Fall back to the Spire!"
The remaining soldiers scrambled into the dark, leaving their heavy gear behind. I let the pressure go. The rain returned to its normal, vertical path. The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by Julian’s ragged breathing.
I looked down at Pierce’s body. He wasn't moving, but the purple glow in his veins had faded. By pulling the virus into the shards, I had at least given him a clean death.
"We have to go to the Stronghold," I said, my voice returning to its normal, trembling human pitch.
"Aria, you heard him," Julian said, standing up shakily. He looked at me with a mixture of awe and terror. "The third shard is part of Kael now. If you pull the magic out of it, Kael dies. He’s the anchor."
"I'm not going to pull the magic out," I said, looking at the two shards in my hand. They were glowing with a terrifyingly beautiful violet-black light. "I'm going to go inside."
"Inside?"
"The mirror isn't a weapon, Julian. It's a doorway. The High Priestess thinks she’s using the void to control the vampires. But she’s never been inside the void. She doesn't know what it’s like to be nothing."
I looked toward the Stronghold on the hill, where the purple light was thickest.
"She thinks she’s the weaver," I whispered, the obsidian ring on my finger feeling like a brand. "But I'm the one who owns the loom."
I knelt down and closed Pierce’s eyes. I took the second shard and pressed it against the first until they fused perfectly into a larger, more menacing crescent.
Half a mirror. Half a soul.
"Let's go, Julian," I said. "We have a King to break."