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Call it good fortune, call it intuition, but that last-minute twist of my body as I dived for the ground was what sav
ed me from the massive fireball that soared past, scorching the air in the space where my torso had just been.
I spat out bits of grass, the taste of fresh lawn now mingling with the traces of blood from my bitten tongue, and I sprinted for the far end of the yard, putting plenty of space between myself and the third member of the Lorica strike team. I should have known.
“Hi, Dusty,” Romira cooed, a second ball of flame already rolled up and ready to launch waiting in the palm of her hand. She twiddled her fingers at me with the other hand, flirtatious and friendly as ever, as if she hadn’t just tried to burn me off the face of the earth.
Romira worked in reception at the Lorica. She was always insanely sweet to me, making suggestive little comments, or playing with her hair and making these weird giggly noises when I was around. None of that had changed, even as she was preparing to cremate me.
The thing to remember about Romira was that in addition to her work at reception, she was both an Eye and a Hand. She was the only person I knew who worked double duty in different departments, and while that meant that she had the skills for reconnaissance and surveillance, it also meant that she was really, really good at killing stuff.
“Romira,” I said, panting, clutching at my knees. “Hey. Caught me at a bad time.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, twirling her hair around one finger. “You guys are being naughty and everything. Just give us the kid and we’ll be on our way.”
“Can’t. We need him. Because reasons.” How the hell was I so winded? I really needed to get more cardio in. All I did was run across the yard.
“Lame. We’re going to have to take him from you then.” She lobbed the fireball with all the speed and skill of a pitcher, and if I hadn’t picked that exact moment to melt into the shadows she would have burned me into a greasy, black stain on the grass.
I reappeared behind her, weighing my options. Both halves of Vanitas were busy, as was Carver. See, this was exactly what he always meant about sharpening my talent, about mastering the honing. I had to have some way to defend myself that didn’t involve calling out the Dark Room and bleeding to death, or alternately, popping up behind someone and whacking them in the head.
That wouldn’t have worked anyway, as it turned out. Romira knew very well what I could do. She spun on her heel, the perfect waves of her hair tumbling in cascading locks over her shoulder as she tutted at me. Who knew how, exactly, but it was like she had eyes in the back of her head. Hah. A Lorica Eye, through and through.
“I really don’t want to hurt you,” she said, pouting. “You’ve gotten so cute, too, all that stubble you’re growing.” She grinned and cocked her shoulder. “Have you been working out?”
My stomach did the tiniest somersault, but what the hell was I thinking? There I was getting giddy over a pretty girl’s possibly false compliments when I should have been way more concerned about how she was shaping another ball of flame between her fingers.
“Maybe a little,” I said. I watched for her next move, slowly becoming aware of snatches of conversation and snippets of heated exchanges happening around me.
“Just a matter of time,” Carver said. “Give it up, boy. Lower the shield.”
“Do you like pasta?” Gil said over the whistling of his claws. “I know a great Sicilian place just off the Gridiron.”
“Who the hell are you people?” Asher was clutching a lawnmower for dear life, as if that could be enough to save him.
“Someone get this fucking thing off me,” Sterling screamed.
And above it all, Romira’s voice. “We can end this, Dusty. Just give us the boy. We’ll take real good care of him. We promise.” She raised two fingers in a peace sign. “Super promise.”
Think fast, I told myself. A breaking point was coming, and someone was going to get hurt in a very real way. I patted at my body. Surely there was something I had that could help. My fingers found it, tucked into my jacket pocket. Amaterasu’s mirror.
Maybe this thing could absorb heat the way it absorbed sunlight. Somehow I wasn’t too confident about testing that, because failure meant being burned alive. Romira was already preparing another of her flame grenades, only she was shaping this one with both hands. It was already the size of a bowling ball, and it still wasn’t done growing.
“I’m curious, Romira. You don’t just make fire, right? You can manipulate it, too?”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” she said. “I’ve put out entire house fires before. It’s not the easiest thing, but you do what you can to save lives, you know?” She looked down at the beach ball-sized sphere of flame in her hands, then laughed softly. “Look at me, talking about saving lives when I’m just about to incinerate you. Last chance to surrender, Dusty. Please? Then we can go for lattes. Or mojitos. Your choice. My treat.”
So she could control fire, even if it wasn’t hers. Fuck it. I had one shot. What goes in, must come out, right? If Amaterasu’s mirror worked anything like those lightning bottles Herald kept at the Lorica, then what I had planned could really only have one effect.
“Bastion. Catch!”
I hurled the mirror with all my might. It sailed across the lawn, catching the light of raw arcane energy as it flew, here blue, there orange, and there again white with the glimmer of the stars. I knew exactly how Bastion would react to the sight of a threat, or a thrown projectile as innocuous as an ornamental mirror. He sneered at it, then clenched his fist.
The goddess’s mirror splintered into pieces, and the concentrated light of the sun rose like a phoenix as it fought to return to its mother. The sound of the sun-fire roared like the end of days, the flames spreading over and across the house, licking and scorching: foliage, grass, shingles, nothing was safe.
Bastion cried out, his first instinct to erect additional shields around both Prudence and Romira – which meant that he had no magic left to power his dome. The telltale glimmer of glass fading around us meant that my gambit had paid off. His force field was down. But there was still the question of the ungodly solar flare Bastion and I had just unleashed in the heart of the Gridiron.
That was where Romira came in. If there was one knee-jerk the Lorica was programmed into, it was saving innocent lives above all else, and not one of them would have risked allowing the cultist normals still slumped unconscious across the lawn to die.
