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“John!”
Sam falls to his knees on the floor next to me. I can tell by the look on his face that I’m a mess. There are puncture wounds on my side and my back, broken bones in my arm and deep gashes around my neck. Everything is sticky with my blood.
“I’m . . . I’m all right,” I tell him.
“Shit, no, you are definitely not,” he replies. “Can you heal?”
“I am healing,” I say.
Sam looks down at me. “No. You’re bleeding.”
“It’s . . . it’s going to happen slow.”
Now that I’m separated from Phiri Dun-Ra, I feel my Legacies gradually returning. With some effort, I lift up my arm and examine the puncture wound underneath it. The black oil is slowly seeping out of me, pushed out by my Legacy as it struggles to knit my body together. Once all that’s cleared from my system, I hope my powers will be fully charged. It’ll just be a matter of me having the strength left to use them.
Sam rips off a piece of his T-shirt and clamps it to my neck.
“This cut isn’t closing even a little,” he says.
“It won’t,” I tell him. I weakly hold up the noose. “They used that Voron noose on me. Like what Pittacus used on Setrákus Ra.”
“Oh man, you’re going to have a scar,” Sam mumbles, shaking his head.
There’s movement on the ceiling. I spot the Shadow Mog just in time. He falls feetfirst out of the darkness, a blaster pointed at us. Back to finish us off.
I shove Sam off me and roll onto my back. The blast burns into the wall between us. Sam reacts swiftly, getting his blaster oriented to return fire. The Mog drops straight down, into another patch of shadows on the floor, and disappears through them.
“Keep your head on a swivel,” I warn as I sit up, clutching the noose.
The Shadow Mog walks out of one of the darkened cells behind me. I don’t turn around in time, but Sam uses his telekinesis to knock the Mog’s blaster aside. His latest shot sizzles into the floor next to me. With a frustrated grunt, our enemy again dives towards some darkness.
I fling the noose towards him.
It isn’t my brightest idea. Without my telekinesis, there’s no way I can make that throw. Luckily, Sam catches on quickly and uses his own telekinesis to guide my impromptu lasso. We get the noose around the Shadow Mog’s head before he disappears, and I yank back on it with what little strength I have left.
I’m hoping to take his head clean off, but no such luck. The Shadow Mog stops midteleport, waist deep in shadow, and clutches the noose. It’s a tug-of-war, and he’s winning. The Voron rope, slick with blood, starts to slide through my hands.
“Behind you!” Sam yells.
I manage to flick a glance over my shoulder. The Shadow Mog’s legs are ten yards down the hall, emerging from another pocket of shadows. He’s just going to keep teleporting through the darkness until he wears us down. The Voron rope slips a little farther out of my hands.
“Lights on!” Sam shouts.
All at once, the lights in the hallway come back on brighter than ever. No more shadows.
The Mog lets out a gasp. His torso flops to the ground in front of us, and his legs drop behind us. He’s been cut in a perfectly straight line through the waist. I yank the noose through his neck with little resistance—he’s already beginning to disintegrate.
“Nicely done,” I tell Sam as he kneels down next to me.
“Guy was really pissing me off,” Sam grumbles, once again fussing over the cut on my neck. “This is going to need stitches, man.”
I put my hand over his as he applies pressure. “Sam, where’s your dad . . . ?”
“He’s fine! I mean, he was the last time I saw him. There was no way out, so he and the other scientists hid down in the old library. The Chimærae were keeping them safe. He’s got my homemade cloaking devices. I ran off to, uh, to let out our secret-weapon psychopath there before Dad could stop me.” Sam takes a breath and looks around. “Where’s Mark?”
I compress my lips and shake my head. Sam looks away from me.
“Goddamn them,” he says quietly. “Goddamn them for all this shit.”
We both go silent at the sound of gunfire from an adjoining hallway. The shooting is cut off by an animalistic roar, desperate screams soon following. That’s got be the huge, deformed Augment that I saw upstairs, the Piken-Mog. It’s close.
Sam looks at me. “Can you fight?”
I grimace and manage to create a weak ball of fire with my Lumen. As soon as I do, my healing Legacy stops working, and my torso is pure agony. I extinguish the flame and focus on healing, shaking my head at Sam.
“Not yet,” I say.
“Then we better move,” he replies. “Unless you want to try that lasso trick again.”
“No thanks,” I say. “This one doesn’t teleport. He knocks down walls.”
Sam gets his arms under me and gently helps me to my feet. I fling my good arm over his shoulders, the other clutched against my stomach, and we shuffle quickly down the hall. Sam’s got one arm around my waist, and the other points a blaster straight ahead. Behind us, the heavy footsteps and grunting of the Piken-Mog echo, slowly becoming more distant.
“You know what I thought the first day I met you in school?” Sam asks me, his voice low, breathing heavily.
I raise an eyebrow at the question. “Uh, no. What?”
“I thought, here’s a guy who’s going to make me carry him halfway across New York City and then later through a top secret underground military base while he bleeds all over the place. I hope we can be best friends.”
I actually laugh at that, even though it hurts my punctured ribs. “You’ve gotten really good at it,” I say.
“Yeah, thanks,” Sam replies with a grim smile.
We edge around a corner, and a gunshot rings out. I feel the bullet whiz right past my cheek.
“Hold your fire!” yells Agent Walker. “Goddamn it, they’re ours!”
Agent Walker stands with an assault rifle at the ready, her face smeared with ash, a nasty-looking blaster burn on one of her legs. In front of her, one of them still aiming a pistol in our direction, are the twins, Caleb and Christian. It was the dead-eyed one, Christian, who took a shot at us. Caleb punches him in the arm to get him to finally lower his gun.
“Sorry,” Caleb says, nodding towards Sam’s blaster. “We saw the blaster coming around the corner and . . .”
“Don’t sweat it,” Sam says. “I’ve been getting shot at for a long time.”
“Good God, if you’re here, how are we losing?”
That comment, directed at me, comes from General Lawson. He’s sandwiched between Walker and the twins, like they’re his bodyguards. The whole unflappable-grandfather act is out the window. Lawson looks like crap. His uniform is torn and bloodstained, he’s got an open gash over his eyebrow and he looks about ten years older than I remember.
“They got the drop on me,” I say through gritted teeth. “I’m out of the fight for now.”
“They got the drop on all of us,” Walker says with a glare in Lawson’s direction. She walks over to my side and helps Sam support my weight. “You . . . you’re going to heal, right?”
“Mostly,” I reply. The punctures are only now beginning to close up, oily black residue leaking out of them.
“Is there anywhere safe?” Sam asks.
“We tried to break through their ranks at the garage,” Lawson says, his expression darkening. “Took heavy losses while they kept bringing in reinforcements. They’ve got a teleporter.”
“Not anymore,” Sam says.
“Did you know about that?” Lawson asks, looking at me. “That they have Legacies?”
“Those aren’t Legacies. They’re sick copies. Augmentations,” I say. “But no, they’re a new thing.”
“They stole that from you,” Lawson says, putting two and two together. “That’s what you were talking about at the meeting the other day.”
“We should keep mov
ing,” Walker puts in.
Lawson shakes his head, still looking at me. “I was not fully informed just how fubared we are.”
“We were doubling back towards the elevators,” Walker says, taking over. “We hoped there would be less resistance.”
“Might be,” I say. “Five just took out a squadron that came down with me. Not sure how many more, but . . .”
We all hear it at the same time. Heavy footfalls bounding down a hallway. Too close.
“There’s a big one,” I tell them. “It’s hunting. It’s—”
“Tearing people apart,” Lawson says. “We saw the bodies.”
Sam glances at Christian. “It probably heard your shot.”
“We need to go,” Walker says. “Now.”
We push on, hustling through one hallway, then zagging down another. The Piken-Mog has our scent, though. I can hear it behind us, getting closer, wailing excitedly.
I realize that I’m the one slowing us down. I glance over my shoulder and see its mammoth shadow moving down the hallway we just left.
