Chapter 98 The Shadow Army

Chapter 98 The Shadow Army
Marcus

My hands were still pressed against Julian’s cold, lifeless metal shoulder. The smell of burnt plastic and melted wires hung thick in my throat. But there was no time to mourn. There was no time to even shed a tear.

The six identical voices still rang in my ears, perfectly matched, perfectly cold.

I looked up from my brother's body. The six women in red coats stood in a flawless crescent moon shape around the mall entrance. They all shared the same cold, pale blue eyes. They all carried the same heavy black rifles. Under Jax’s hands, the bleeding version of Vane we had just beaten turned entirely into a pile of glittering silver sand, scattering across the marble floor.

"They're all puppets," Jax whispered, his voice shaking as he backed away from the pile of dust. He raised his rifle, swinging the barrel from one red coat to the next. "Sarah, get Lily behind the pillars. Now!"

My mind screamed in frustration. We had sacrificed Julian to stop the signal. My brother had died to fry that master drive, thinking he was saving everyone. And now, the real enemy was standing right in front of us, six times over.

"Which one is real?" I shouted, my voice cracking with pure hatred. "Which one of you monsters actually killed my family?"

The six women didn't look angry. They didn't smile. At the same time, they lifted their rifles, locking the black barrels onto my chest.

"The original Vane is safely watching from the high spire, Marcus," the clone on the far left said.

"We are her hands," the second one continued.

"We are her eyes," the third one added.

"And your journey ends in this lobby," the remaining three finished together.

Before they could pull their triggers, Jax let out a wild roar of pure survival instinct. He fired his rifle into the center of the group. The heavy bullet punched straight through the chest of the middle clone. She didn't bleed. Her body instantly burst into a cloud of that same silver dust, blinding the women standing right next to her.

"Run!" Jax screamed, grabbing my arm and yanking me backward.

Sarah

I scooped Lily up into my arms, ignoring the sharp, stabbing fire in my broken ribs. Every step felt like someone was driving a nail into my side, but the sight of those identical faces made me run faster than I ever had in my life.

We threw ourselves behind a thick concrete pillar just as the remaining five clones opened fire.

The sound was deafening. A storm of high-velocity bullets chewed into the other side of our pillar, showering us in white plaster dust and sharp stone chunks. Lily buried her face in my neck, her small body shaking with heavy, silent sobs.

"Jax! Marcus! Over here!" I yelled through the noise.

Jax tumbled behind the next pillar over, his jacket torn and bleeding from a grazing bullet wound on his arm. He scrambled to his knees, frantically trying to shove another magazine into his hot rifle.

But Marcus didn't follow him.

Marcus was standing right in the open space, his head lowered, his fists clenched so tightly that blood was dripping from his cracked knuckles onto the floor. The blue data lines on his skin weren't blinking anymore. They were glowing with a solid, angry, blinding white light.

"Marcus, hide!" I shrieked, reaching out with one hand. "You don't have your weapon!"

"I don't need it," Marcus said, his voice terrifyingly quiet.

He wasn't looking at the clones. He was looking at Julian’s dark, empty body. The sight of his brother being used and discarded like trash had finally broken something inside him. The fear was gone. The pain of the fall was gone. There was only room for one thing now: absolute destruction.

Marcus

The four remaining clones stepped through the dust, their boots clicking in perfect rhythm. They aimed their weapons right at my face.

"Neural asset showing high stress levels," one clone stated. "Execute termination."

They fired.

But the bullets never hit me. The moment the metal projectiles got within a foot of my skin, the white-hot energy blooming from my data lines exploded outward. A spherical shield of pure, raw electricity snapped into existence around me, vaporizing the bullets into tiny puffs of gray smoke before they could touch my clothes.

My father had said my body was a circuit. Grand Marshall Vane had said she wanted to plug me into the city core. If they wanted my power so badly, I was going to give it to them until they burned to ash.

I threw my hands forward, releasing a massive, jagged wave of white lightning straight at the escalator.

The electrical blast ripped through the marble floor, tearing up the stone tiles like paper. It slammed into the four clones simultaneously. Their synthetic skin melted instantly, exposing the crude silver skeletons underneath before they completely dissolved into massive clouds of blinding dust.

The lobby went dead silent again. The gunfire stopped.

I gasped for air, the white light on my skin fading back to a dull, throbbing blue. My legs felt like lead, and my vision was blurring at the edges. I had used everything I had left.

"Marcus..." Sarah breathed, stepping out from behind the pillar with Lily.

Jax lowered his rifle, looking at the piles of silver sand with a look of pure awe. "You... you wiped them out."

"Not all of them," a heavy, mechanical voice boomed from the high ceiling.

We all looked up through the shattered glass dome. Dangling from a massive military chopper hovering above the mall was a giant, armored cage made of black steel bars. Inside the cage, strapped to a massive medical chair with thick leather belts, was a young girl with short-cropped hair.

The girl’s eyes were glowing with a bright, painful purple light, and thick cables were plugged directly into the back of her skull.

My stomach dropped into ice. It was Maya. The little girl from the lower sector orphanages who had disappeared during the first Reaping. They hadn't killed her. They were using her as a living antenna to broadcast the final phase across the entire upper sky.

Standing on top of the black cage was a seventh version of Grand Marshall Vane. She held a heavy metal rod attached to Maya's chair.

"You stopped the ground signal, Marcus," Vane shouted down through the wind of the chopper blades. "But the sky belongs to me. If you don't climb into this cage willingly, I will dump her mind into the city grid right now, and she will burn from the inside out."

Maya is the secondary broadcast key! With Vane threatening to fry the little girl's mind from the sky, will Marcus surrender his body to save her, or choose the path of blood?