From atop a heap of riverside rubble in some long-abandoned subsect of what had once been Brooklyn, the resistance fighter peered through her rifle scope at the clear yet frustratingly incomplete evidence of what they already knew.
Something was up in Old New York.
It wasn’t just that they were still calling the place Old New York, despite the awkward fact that there wasn’t a New New York and that Old New York, syntactically speaking, was probably better referred to as York. Not that any of that was worth getting into a tizzy. It wasn’t like the old rules applied anymore.
And judging by the armor of the party she scoped across the river—the cut of those pauldrons (or were they spaulders? she could never keep it straight)—they had infinitely bigger problems to worry about. Royal guard, assuming she was reading it right. The Picks didn’t exactly broadcast such things, at least not with the kind of shiny insignia and distinguishing uniforms she’d come to expect from big, loud outfits like the EDF. Still, the Picks seemed to be able to discern among their own ranks just fine, and with a good deal of practice, she’d started to see it too: the subtle differences in braids or stature. The shape and condition of the average set of armor, from one rank to the next. The slightest variations in the extensive Pick tattoos, variations they’d only just begun to decipher. But these? These were royal guard. She was at least ninety percent sure.
And if the royal guard were in town…
“We should probably bug out,” she said.
Her partner eyed her with a knowing look. He lay with his side pressed to hers, his unruly hair banded back to keep his vision clear. The sight of his less-than-epic beard scraggle nearly made her smile before reality cut back in.
HQ would want to hear about this immediately, and Cutter would probably be pissed. Not that that’d ever stopped either of them from doing much of anything. Cutter was always pissed. Trying to avoid the grumpy bastard’s grump was like trying to keep the rain from getting itself wet.
But they had to be realistic. It wasn’t like they could roll up through a parade of royal guard and cap the Prophet King as he stepped out of his stretch limo—for starters, because he didn’t have one. And also because they still had no idea what his death would bring.
But mostly, all happy hypotheticals aside, because the Prophet King would see them coming from half a city away.
“We should go,” she repeated, resisting the urge to add the obligatory while we still can. Thinking of the king had set off that familiar itch at the back of her neck, a sudden dread—not quite paranoia—that it was already too late, that her very thoughts might’ve already betrayed them.
She felt her partner’s unhappy agreement as he got his hands under himself, preparing to move. She could feel his frustrations as clearly as her own. At the end of the day, their frustrations were one and the same. The hopelessness of this entire situation. The clear sign that something was about to happen here. And their combined helplessness to do a single damn thing about it, other than some paltry scouting. Day by day, with the scouting and the planning and the utterly maddening lack of doing anything at all.
It was almost enough to make a girl wish she’d never left the EDF.
But that was the bitterness of the moment talking. There were worse things than trying and failing. Far worse. There was complacency, for instance. There was surrender. There was the so-called Earth Defense Force, shame be its name. And for all of them alike—the fighters and the hiders, the rebels and the turncoats—there was survival.
At least until there wasn’t.
She slid down the slab of broken rooftop after her partner, searching for the embankment where they’d left their ride. They must’ve done a decent job hiding it, because her eyes found nothing.
“Do you see where—”
A tug and a rough shove pinned her against the dusty remainder of the stairwell. For a confused second, she thought maybe he’d caught a jolt of something bold and frisky.
Then she registered the tension in him, the cry for silence in his eyes. Patrol. The low hum of repulsor sleds drifted up the stairwell, crawling by on the street below. The Picks themselves were creepy quiet on their feet, even the lowest foot soldiers.
Her partner was too busy tracking the patrol to notice she’d gotten herself under control. Slowly, calmly, she pried his hand from her mouth. He gave her a sardonic grin, half-apologetic. Close calls were nothing new out here, not by a long shot. The patrols were standard, albeit fairly random, an ever-roaming presence they’d learned to deal with in the field. There was nothing strange about this one, she told herself. But even so, as she leaned over to sneak a peek, she still couldn’t help the feeling that these Picks were out looking for them. That somehow, they knew.
And it wasn’t hard to imagine how, or why.
The Prophet King.
It didn’t matter that there was basically no chance in hell his royal highness would concern himself with the likes of them, scurrying through the ruins like rats. Not after all this time. But the thought clung to her like a campfire story. It didn’t matter how low the odds were. As far as her lizard brain was concerned, the king followed them down the dark stairwell, watching from the shadows.
She did her best to focus on the tangible: the patrols, the way forward. For the next grueling stretch of however long, it was all they could do, cat-and-mousing their way through abandoned city blocks from one crumbling scrap of cover to the next, until signs of life began to reassert themselves.
They pushed on, tension bleeding as they reentered the layers of what passed for city life these days. No one called this place Old Brooklyn. No one called it anything—or talked much at all any time unfamiliar faces were about. Maybe what passed for city life these days wasn’t all that different than before.
She did wonder, sometimes, if she and her partner and their merry band of rebels weren’t fighting to hold onto something that was never really there to begin with. The answer stared back as they pushed through the crowded market square: The tired shadows in the people’s eyes. The vendors who barely cared whether anyone stopped. The way one gaunt little girl, having kicked her ball too close to them, bowed her head as she approached, afraid to meet their eyes. The world was broken, its spirit trampled.
And there, across the East River, was but one towering beacon among the many reminding them why.
“Think we’re clear.” Her partner stood at the edge of the market, checking their surroundings with that practiced casualness he’d perfected over the years.
They slipped back out of town for the quiet embankment where they’d hidden their ride. It was hard—well, pretty much impossible—to tell if the effort of washing their trail was worth it. Chances were they’d been clear ever since that patrol passed their lookout. But protocol was protocol. You never knew when the shadows might be watching.
And all of this just to tell Cutter and Schetter that something was up.
She pushed down the crushing sense of futility and focused on the area she knew their battered repulsor wagon would be, or should be, safely nestled with its precious cargo beneath a cam tarp. She imagined she could see the spot faintly quivering as they hurried down the abandoned street, and she marveled, as she often did at the most unexpected times, at the thought of lives past, when people hadn’t had anything more pressing to worry about than not leaving their kids and pets unattended in cars on hot summer days.
“So what do we actually know?” Her partner grabbed the cam tarp and pulled.
She cut him off with a sharp gesture before she could even say why. Something in the air, above the whispered rustling of the cam tarp. A pressure. A feeling. A distant roar of—
“Holy fucknuts,” he murmured.
Which pretty much covered it.
When she first followed his gaping attention across the East River, she thought it was a meteor. One of theirs. For a split second, that was all she could think. Her mind wiped blank with the terminal certainty that after all these years, all the toils and careful maneuvering, this was it.
Then the speeding blur of their impending doom yanked into an unnatural deceleration, and the sky shook with thunder as the figure slammed down into Old New York. The blue-and-white humanoid colossus dwarfed the surrounding buildings like something out of a freaking Gundam cartoon—a freaking Gundam anime, corrected the Ghost of Nate Past somewhere in the back of her mind, as if he hadn’t been gone three years and counting.
And as soon as that dumb little thought flashed past, the impossibility came crashing down on her head like a vengeful titan from the heavens.
Head spinning, Gwen turned to Marty and saw her own disbelief openly reflected back.
“Is that what I think it is?” he whispered, cam tarp hanging forgotten in his hand.
Then movement flickered at the edge of a nearby building, and the shadows came for them.
