Leave him, her brain said. He’s trouble, he knows too much.
But before she could even acknowledge what her head was saying she was halfway across the roof, diving like a fielder as the boy tumbled over the side. She skidded on her stomach, stretching as far as she could, thinking she’d missed him before his hand caught hers. He felt like an anchor, his momentum pulling her over. She dug in everything she could, the nails of her other hand gouging into the dust and filth of the roof, catching the bricks and holding her.
She screamed, the boy hanging from her arm, heavy enough to rip it from the socket like a turkey leg at Thanksgiving. Beneath them people swarmed like insects, so far down. Marlow struggled, swinging back and forth, his sneakers scuffing the brickwork as he tried to pull himself up. She couldn’t hold him, no way. Stupid stupid stupid, she told herself, knowing that if she didn’t cut him free he was going to drag them both to their deaths. But his hands were on hers now, clinging like barnacles. He looked like he was having trouble breathing, his face turning purple.
“Let go,” she grunted.
“No way!” Marlow shot back. “Pull me up!”
She tried, the fingers of her left hand slipping on the roof, her body sliding closer to the edge.
“I can’t, you have to let go.”
Pop, a current of warm air. Pan looked back to see Patrick reappear on the roof. He tucked a strand of long blond hair behind his ear and grinned at her.
“That was stupid, Pan,” he said.
Pan tried to shake Marlow loose but his fingers were a vise around her wrist. She scanned the floor. The crossbow was by the stairwell door, the pistol closer, but she had no hands to reach with. Patrick knew it, too, walking closer, never taking his eyes off her.
“The irony is we wanted him”—he nodded over the edge at Marlow—“to get to you. We thought he might be able to lead us to where you were hiding. You’re so damn good at hiding.”
He squatted down next to her, picking up the pistol and studying it like it was the first time he’d seen one.
“But here you are, you plonked yourself right in the palm of my hand.” He sniffed the air. “And you don’t even have a contract. Killing a kitten couldn’t be easier.”
“You’d know,” Pan spat, fat beads of sweat dripping down her forehead, into her eyes. She didn’t blink, though, didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing that she was afraid. “What are you waiting for, anyway? Not got the guts to pull the trigger?”
“Oh, I don’t want you dead,” he said, pointing the gun at her stomach. “That would be a waste of an asset. I know how much information you’ve got in that pretty little head of yours.”
This was bad. Better to die than let them take you, she told herself. They’ll torture you, then kill you anyway. Let go, just drop. Three seconds, four at most, then it will all be over. She was out of contract. If she died now, then the demons could never take her.
But she’d been too close to death too many times, and that gaping absence scared her almost as much as hell did. She tightened her grip on the bricks, the pain sharpening in her cramping fingers.
“Where’s Ostheim?” Patrick asked, pushing the barrel of the gun into her ribs.
“With your mom,” she said.
The boy laughed but there was no humor in his cold, blue eyes. He pushed the gun in farther, his finger twitching on the trigger.
“Not good enough,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s what Ostheim said.”
“Last chance, Pan.”
She laughed. Not because it was funny but because she wouldn’t be able to tell him even if she did know. She had no idea where Ostheim was. Nobody did. Not even Ostheim knew where he was half the time. He traveled on a remote unit, never stopping for more than an hour, never broadcasting his location. It had been like that for as long as she’d been a Hellraiser. She’d never even met Ostheim. None of the Engineers had. What better way to protect the guy at the top than to keep the whole operation blind?
“Fine,” the boy said, all trace of a smile now wiped clean. “You don’t deserve to live anyway. One less piece of vermin in the world. Just remember, you—”
A streak of light blazed past and Patrick’s head lurched back with a crack. He toppled onto his ass, spitting blood, the gun clattering away. There was another splintering crunch as something hit Patrick in the mouth. The blur skidded to a halt, taking the slim shape of Nightingale. She was panting, out of breath, which wasn’t surprising, really, given she’d been running too fast to see. The boy was groaning, clutching his broken teeth. He lifted a hand and Pan felt the air twist and bubble as he prepared to teleport Night—probably into the middle of a tree, or a hundred yards into the air.
“Night!” Pan shouted, and the girl became a blur again, running in a circle around the roof and blasting up a whirlwind of dust. With a look of pure fury, Patrick snapped out of existence. Night reappeared as she stopped running, staggered, looked for a moment like she was about to pass out, then walked to the edge of the roof. She grabbed Pan’s arm, pulling hard. Pan grimaced, swinging Marlow up. The kid reached for the roof, missed, but on the second attempt he caught hold.
She almost didn’t have the strength to pull herself up, but Night’s skinny arms helped. She hauled her body onto the bricks and lay there for a moment, everything aching, feeling like she’d been stretched on the rack.
“Chu okay?” Night asked in her thick Spanish accent.
“Yeah, fine,” Pan said, pushing herself up with arms that felt like tissue paper. “Thanks.”
“De nada,” Night said, bouncing back and forth from one foot to the other. Nightingale couldn’t stay still for more than a millisecond. “Where’d the hijo de puta go? ’Porters, always cowards.”
“Anyone want to tell me what’s going on?” said Marlow. He was sitting on the floor looking like he’d just gone ten rounds with Truck, his face drenched in sweat, his whole body trembling. He had his inhaler in one hand and was squeezing off shot after shot into his mouth. “You drugged me, right? This is … this is just some joke.”
“Ha, ha, yeah, you got us. So funny!” she replied, deadpan. She turned to Nightingale. “Where’s Truck?”
“Downstairs, other one’s a Reader but he knocked her out cold.”
A Mind Reader. They were brutal if they wanted to be, could control your thoughts, could make you strangle your own mother, then run under a bus. Pan set off across the roof, picking up the crossbow as she headed for the stairwell.
“That douche has probably ’ported down there, we’d better go help.” She jammed a finger on her mic. “Hey, Truck, you there? I think the ’Porter’s heading your way.”
There was a hiss of static in her ear, then Truck’s voice—“You think?”—almost lost in the rumble of an explosion. Pan could feel it in her feet, like the whole school was about to collapse. She broke into a run.
“Hey, what about me?” Marlow yelled behind her.
“Stay here if you want,” she shouted over her shoulder. “But if you’re planning on living out the day, I suggest you follow me.”
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
Marlow scrabbled to his feet, wondering for a moment if his lungs had fallen out while he’d been hanging over the roof. He’d pumped seven shots of his inhaler but he was still struggling to breathe. Some situations were so bad that even Ventolin couldn’t help. Yeah, like being thrown off the school tower by a guy who can teleport and then being saved by a girl who’s just come back from the dead. His mind must have fallen out, too, because he was pretty sure he’d lost it.
He wasn’t crazy enough to stay here by himself, though. The girl might have looked like she wanted him dead, but she had risked her life to save him. The guy called Patrick had been about to homicide his ass.
He set off after the girl—girls, although the petite one seemed to have vanished again. He stumbled into the stairwell, clutching the banister hard because he didn’t trust his shaking legs to hold him. By the t
ime he reached the deserted ground floor hallway he could hear noises spilling out of the lobby, shouts and something that might have been a gunshot or an explosion. He turned, ready to flee, only to thump into somebody running the other way.
“Hey!” he yelled, panicking until he recognized Charlie’s face. The relief of seeing him alive was almost overwhelming and before he even knew what he was doing he’d thrown himself at the boy, hugging him tight.
“What happened?” Marlow asked once Charlie had squirmed loose. “You disappeared.”
“I have no idea,” he replied. “One minute I’m kicking the crap outta that guy and the next I’m all the way up in the art room. Man, I black out or something?”
“Something,” Marlow replied.
With an almighty crack the lobby doors blew off their hinges, tearing through a bank of lockers and cartwheeling down the hallway. Marlow dived out of the way, looked up to see that all hell had broken loose in there. The lobby looked like it was burning up, flames licking the walls and an upside-down flood of thick, black smoke billowing out. There were shapes in the chaos, forms that swept back and forth so fast and so erratically that they could have been made of shadow and smoke.
“Come on,” said Charlie. “We gotta get out of here.”
A burst of light burned its way into the hallway and suddenly Patrick was there, just yards away, engulfed in a ball of fire. He managed to shrug off his coat before a blurred shape streaked out of the lobby and thumped into him. They crashed into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Through the dust Marlow could make out the girl from the roof sitting on the guy’s chest, her fists as fast as a pneumatic drill. Patrick managed to get a hand up but the girl was too fast, disappearing into a fizzing silhouette of light. The wall behind her vanished as if somebody had willed it out of existence. With a groan like a dying whale the ceiling cracked and drooped, the windows blowing out in a hail of glass.
Patrick struggled to his feet, barely sparing Marlow a glance. He ran for the hole in the wall but the girl blazed in front of him, tripping him and sending him sprawling. Then she was on his back, those hammer blows pummeling his face into the floor. Patrick growled and vanished, reappearing an instant later behind the girl. He looked exhausted but he had enough strength to grab her around the neck, choking off her cry. She pushed herself back, sending them both flying into another bank of lockers, caving a hole in the metal. But he didn’t let go, squeezing so hard her face was turning blue.
“Hey!” Marlow shouted. “Get off her!”
Patrick didn’t even hear him. Marlow started toward them, not sure what he was planning to do but knowing he had to do something. The smoke from the lobby curled into his lungs like fingers.
“Marlow,” he heard Charlie behind him, “you crazy? Come on!”
There was another explosion from the lobby and Marlow turned to see a man bulldoze his way out of the fire. He was huge, like bigger-than-Yogi huge, and he had a face like a bulldog that had swallowed a mouthful of bees. He bowled down the hallway, gaining momentum with every step. The big guy reached out with a fist the size of a catcher’s mitt, engulfing Patrick’s face and hoisting him into the air. He threw the man like he was a rag doll, hard enough to punch him through the doors at the far end. Then he crouched down beside the girl, who was recovering her breath.
“You okay, Night?” he asked in a voice that rolled like thunder. She nodded, letting him help her up. Both the guy and the girl turned and looked at Marlow, dismissing him in a way that made him feel relieved and disappointed all at once. “I’ll get Patrick,” the guy said. “Go make sure Pan’s all right.”
They split up, but only for a second. After a couple of steps the big guy stopped walking, putting a hand to his head like he was in pain. He staggered, collapsing against the wall. Then he turned, lurching back the way he’d come. There was something different about his face, his mouth drooping, his eyes unfocused. And the way he walked reminded Marlow of the old zombie films. It was almost comical, until he drew level with Night and wrapped his tree-trunk arms around her in a bear hug. She screamed as he lifted her off the floor, struggling against him.
“Truck! Stop! What are you doing?”
“Not…” the big guy grunted. His nose was leaking blood. “Not … me…”
The girl was wriggling so furiously that she was just a blur again, like the guy was holding on to a mirage. It was making Marlow’s eyes hurt just to look at it. He backed off a step, feeling Charlie’s hands around his arm, tugging him.
The blond girl emerged from the lobby. Her face was bruised but her eyes were colder and more focused than ever. She was weaving her fingers in front of her, like before, whispering something under her breath. What had Pan said, up on the roof? That the girl was a Reader? Each movement of her hands held an invisible string, like she was a puppet master and the big guy was her plaything. He squeezed and something inside Night cracked like a pistol shot.
“Kill her,” the girl was saying. “Kill her kill her kill her.”
Marlow shook Charlie loose, grabbing the first thing he could see—a fire extinguisher. He wrenched the pin out of the handle like it was a grenade, then fired it. A white plume of carbon dioxide jetted out of the end and filled the corridor. He tried not to breathe it in but there was nothing he could do, the acrid taste filling his mouth, scouring his damaged lungs. He fired it again, marching forward and directing the flow right at the girl.
She coughed, using a shoulder to wipe her watering eyes. But her hands were still working away, pulling Truck’s strings. Marlow hefted the fire extinguisher above his head and charged at her, ready to KO her out of the equation.
He never got the chance.
The girl suddenly cried out, collapsing onto one knee. She put her fingers to her shoulder and Marlow could see some kind of arrow sticking out of her uniform, slick with her blood. Pan strode out of the lobby, reloading her crossbow as she went.
“Truck, you okay?” she said as she walked, lifting the bow and aiming it at the mousy girl’s head. Truck was looking at his hands like he no longer trusted them, the girl called Night now lying in a puddle of quivering limbs at his feet.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”
Patrick’s sister was trying to get back to her feet, one hand rising up, trembling like it belonged to an old woman. Marlow felt a pang of agony lance across the front of his head, realized he was staggering down the corridor toward Pan, somebody else at the wheel.
No! He barked the order at his brain and felt the girl’s telepathic hold waver—not by much, but enough to let him wriggle free of it. He swung the extinguisher. It was a lucky shot, catching her in the temple and knocking her to the floor. She lay still, only the soft rise and fall of her chest letting him know he hadn’t just become a killer.
His weapon hit the floor with a clang and he reached for his inhaler, shaking it. There wasn’t much left. Another bout of vertigo hit him and he had to sit down on the ledge by the window to stop the world doing cartwheels. Charlie perched next to him, his face a mask of shock and disbelief, as if he’d just been pulled out of a car crash. Marlow guessed his own face looked exactly the same. Only it wasn’t a car that had crashed, it was reality.
Pan reached the girl and toed her with her boot to make sure she was unconscious. She grabbed the crossbow bolt and tugged it free with a spurt of blood. Wiping it on her trousers, she slid it into her pocket, then held a hand out to Night.
“You good?” she asked, hauling the smaller girl up.
“I’m fine,” Night wheezed, her voice a crone’s cackle. She coughed, looking up at the big guy. “Not the first time he’s got a little too friendly, right, Truck?”
“Hey,” he said with a sheepish shrug. “What can I say, I’m a hugger.” He looked over his shoulder toward the far end of the corridor. “We still got one loose, and he’ll be … Yeah, I thought so.”
All eyes turned to see Patrick stagger back through the doors. He looked like he’d been hit b
y a train, one arm hanging by his side—too loose, probably dislocated—the other feeling its way along the wall. Pan stepped to the front of the group, aiming her crossbow at him. It would have to be a good shot from here, maybe twenty yards between them.
“Let Brianna go,” Patrick said, spitting out something that might have been a tooth. “Don’t you dare…”
“Dare what?” Pan said, swinging the crossbow back until it was pointed right at the girl’s head. “Kill her? Why not? You were going to kill me, kill us.”
Patrick staggered forward a few more paces, grimacing. His good hand was flexing but whatever magic he had possessed before seemed to have dried up. He stopped halfway down the corridor.
“She’s my sister,” he said, almost pleading. “Give her back and we’ll go, I promise.”
“Too late,” Pan replied. “You play the game, you take the pain. You can go. But she stays with us.”
“Please,” he said.
Pan tilted her head, like something had buzzed into her ear. She brushed at it with her free hand. Marlow could feel it too, a soft hum deep inside his skull, like when you could hear the subway rumbling through the grates. He shook his head, trying to ignore the sensation of something crawling inside his brain.
“You got three seconds,” Pan said. “Get out of my sight or I swear to whoever built the Engines I’ll put a bolt right through her head. One.”
Patrick must have seen something in her expression because he straightened, his eyes so full of hate that they didn’t look human. He pointed a finger at Pan and she shook her head in a warning.
“Uh-uh,” she said, her head still twitching in discomfort. “That’s two.”
“Brianna, I’ll come back for you, I promise,” he said, almost in tears. Then, to Pan, “And you’ll pay for this.”
She snorted a bitter laugh.