Page 3 of Ash Fall

I look down and find that silvery light covering my fingers.

My breath catches as the glow grows brighter. I lift my hands, and the light stretches toward Mars and the shadows surrounding him.

I don't understand any of it. The shadows around him move closer, and the light coming from my hands brightens in response.

Then the footsteps reach the top of the basement stairs and stop.

I turn toward the doorway just as the floor rumbles beneath my boots.

A second later, the whole house starts shaking.

Chapter 2 - Gage

My shoulder aches from the kick of the rifle even as my scope whites out. I jerk back from the eyepiece and blink hard until the spots swimming across my vision start to clear. When I lean in again to find her, to see what the hell just exploded through that basement, my hands are shaking too badly to hold the sight steady.

Fuck it. I need to be there. Whatever is happening in that room, I need to see it with my own eyes and have my hands free to do something about it. I sling the rifle over my shoulder and take the narrow wooden stairs of the bell tower two at a time. Somehow, I'm at the bottom before I've finished deciding to run, and my boots hit the floor of the nave hard enough that I stumble because I got down those stairs too fucking fast.

Brannick told me there was something different inside me, something that had been dormant until all this happened. I didn't really believe him then. It gets harder to doubt when my body keeps doing things it couldn't do a week ago.

Penny scrambles up from her spot near the door and races after me, abandoning her ball as her nails click across the old stone floor. Outside, the ravine sits between me and the house. There's a wooden staircase built into the hillside half a kilometer down, but I'm not wasting time running for it when I can see the wire at the top of the slope from here. I don't know if Luna is safe, and that's enough to send me straight up the steep face.

Dry earth crumbles beneath my boots causing me to slide backward before catching myself on a root. I dig in and try again, only to lose another section of dirt and slide farther down. Frustration breaks loose, and I slam my fist into the slope above me.

The ground moves.

I freeze as a flat shelf of packed earth pushes out of the hillside where my fist hit. It's wide enough to stand on and solid enough that I can see exactly what it is without understanding how the fuck I made it. I stare at it for a second, then stop wasting time asking questions.

My boot lands on the ledge, and I focus on the dirt above me. The same pressure I've felt building inside me since Brannick started talking about magic tightens through my body. I push at it deliberately this time, and another section of earth moves. A second ledge forms above the first.

"Holy shit."

I climb onto it and push again. Another shelf forms, then another, each one giving me somewhere solid to put my boots. A rough laugh escapes me because I'm building stairs out of a hillside with just a wish now. Fine. I'll deal with that later. Right now I don’t care as long as it gets me to Luna faster.

The ledges keep forming as I climb. Penny bounds up behind me with her tail going hard enough to throw off her balance, convinced I've invented a new game specifically for her. We reach the top together, and I swing over the wire divider while she squeezes underneath it. I cross the alley and reach our back gate just as a voice carries from the street out front.

"Oi, go get Davey already! Tell him he can loot the place later for video games. We need to get these people to the warehouse."

My hand tightens around the latch. Davey. If that's the soldier who went into the basement, someone’s going to come looking for him any minute.

"Fuck."

I shove through the gate and run across the yard. My boots hit the deck stairs hard before I slam through the back door. For one second, everything inside the house is painfully familiar. The dining room. The furniture. The faint scent of whatever candle Luna burned last. Every detail is exactly the way I pictured it while I was trying to get back here.

Penny doesn't share my moment. She tears past me at full speed toward her food and water bowls because surviving the end of the world has done nothing to rearrange her priorities.

I keep moving until I reach the top of the basement stairs, where my hand closes around the railing and I stop. I don't want to go down, and that realization pisses me off enough that I nearly force myself forward anyway, but my body refuses to cooperate for another second. I saw the flash through the scope and heard the shot, and every ugly possibility about Luna is waiting at the bottom of those stairs.

The floor trembles beneath my boots. A low groan moves through the walls as the house shifts around me and I immediately think earthquake. It's not me, or at least I don’t think it is. I’m not consciously putting out the same pressure I used on the hillside, but we also don’t generally have earthquakes here.

I drag in a slow breath and force the image of Luna bleeding out of my head. Whatever this power is, if I caused this, I can't have it reacting every time fear gets the better of me. I shove the panic down even as the floor stops moving. Learning how to control this just moved much higher on my list, but not now. I tighten my hand on the railing once, let go, and start down the stairs.

Relief hits so hard at the bottom that my knees almost give. Luna, Torrin and Mars are all standing. There's a body on the floor with one side of its skull caved in, but everyone else looks okay.

Mars opens his mouth, but I don't give him the chance to speak. My fist catches him square in the jaw as I pass. He drops with a grunt, and I step around him without slowing down because the only person I care about reaching is Luna.

Her face crumples the second she sees me.

"Ga-ge."