The Last City Page 25

  Not far from Eli, Ev’r fought savagely against both mutant and Skreaf. She stabbed, cursed, kicked and punched, one hand still clasped around whatever she’d found under the sand. Eli saw she was trying to protect it from the blows pelting her body. She was struggling. Sweat-diluted blood streamed down her face. Two of the Skreaf grabbed her and pinned her to the ground. The third stood over her. Its low, monotone chanting chilled Eli to his soul. They were killing her gradually and luxuriating in her suffering. On instinct, Eli sprang to his feet and charged them. He had no weapon, no shield, no clue what he was doing – except that whatever it was, it was happening now and fast. He managed to lift his bound hands far enough to rip the green diamond from the chain around his neck. He held it up and screamed the first thing he thought of.

  ‘Stop!’

  He threw the diamond at them.

  To his utter shock, all three Skreaf shrieked, the screaming mouths of the demons inside them stretching their skin. In a smoke-reeking bang of dark magics, they dissipated into mist and vanished back into the rip in the air before it sealed over.

  ‘Keets!’ Eli grabbed her arm and helped her stagger to her feet. Liquid dripped from one of her hands. Whatever she had been holding had broken. The mutants, who had paused their attack for several seconds, now started back in. Ev’r deflected a swinging club and kicked another one in the face, smashing its jaw.

  ‘Grab on!’ she yelled at Eli, holding out her hand.

  He obeyed and seized her whole arm. There was only a moment to notice the unusual scaly feel to her skin, then the most excruciating pain he had ever experienced exploded through his entire body. He was falling out of control through a blur of grey, speeding down and down and down, screaming, until he was suddenly hurtled back into real time and slammed into the sand.

  Eli lay unconscious, for what felt to him like a second but could have been a day, before he jolted to clarity. He scrambled up and managed to manoeuvre the light-blaster out of his weapon belt. Lifting his tied hands as high as he could, he shone the beam through the darkness and saw they’d landed in a giant Skither tunnel under the sand. He strained his ears for any slithering sounds, and when he heard none, he scanned the light around him. The beam picked up the shadow form of Ev’r, kneeling close by with her back to him. A blackness had spread all over her patchwork skin, blotting out her tattoos and scars and everything that was her. Now he recognised the scale forming over the darkness – the red-tipped shiny black armour of a Ravien.

  Eli stared, incapable of words or sounds. He’d only heard of a few ancient cases where people had been infected by the beasts, and in every story the person had turned to Ravien almost straightaway, but Ev’r had held it back for who knew how long – until now. Her body heaved. Eli crept towards her on numb and shaking legs. He trod a wide path out of arm’s reach and stopped in front of her. She knelt with her head down and eyes closed. Pieces of a broken vial lay in one open palm. Blood dripped from her mouth and lips from where she had tried to drink from the shattered glass.

  ‘Ev’r,’ Eli whispered.

  Her eyelids flicked open and she stared at him with eyes almost completely turned to liquid darkness. She slid the blade from her belt and Eli backed away, but Ev’r held it up to her own throat and positioned the point just above her jugular.

  ‘No!’ Eli rushed at her and grabbed her hands as best he could, fighting to drag the knife away. ‘Don’t do it! I can help you!’

  ‘No one can help me!’ Ev’r said, the sound alternating between her own voice and an alien snarl. She threw him off, but he quickly found his feet and shone the torchlight on her. He saw the darkness of her skin receding.

  ‘Look!’ Eli yelled. ‘Your skin is changing back.’

  Ev’r lowered the blade and examined her arms. The scales had vanished and the blackness was shrinking back down towards her fingers. It stopped on the very tips, leaving a small dark patch, like blood dried black under the skin.

  ‘It’s only reversed it,’ Ev’r said, her tone dull. ‘It hasn’t cured it. I couldn’t get enough from the broken pieces.’ Her fingers clenched around the knife handle.

  Eli stepped in quickly. ‘Then I’ll analyse the glass. I’ll figure out what was in the potion and I’ll re-create it. I’ll help you – I promise.’

  Ev’r stared up at him, distrust narrowing her green eyes. ‘Why would you help me?’

  ‘Because you’re going to help me,’ Eli said. ‘You need a cure. I need to save my friends.’

  ‘Did it look as though I can fight the Skreaf?’ she asked.

  ‘We don’t necessarily need to fight them. We just need to try to figure out what their plans are so that we can find the commander and the others and stop the witches together.’

  She snorted. ‘You think it will be that easy, do you?’

  ‘Well what are the options? Kill yourself? Turn into a Ravien?’ Eli said. ‘Do you really want that?’

  Ev’r considered it and finally shook her head.

  ‘So, okay,’ Eli said. ‘I help you, you help me. First step is we have to get back to Scorpia, back to the shelter. I’ll start analysing the potion and you can start compiling what we already know about the Skreaf. Okay? . . . Ev’r?’

  She wasn’t listening to him. She was staring over his shoulder instead. He turned around slowly. The Death stood right behind him, its fangs bared.

  The creature lunged. Eli gasped and shut his eyes. Air gusted past him as the Death leapt over his head. Eli spun around. Ev’r slashed her blade at the creature, but the Death smacked her to one side and kept running. He vanished around a bend in the tunnel and soon they heard snarling and ripping cloth.

  ‘Untie me!’ Eli said. Ev’r hesitated then sliced through the ropes binding his hands and body. He shook himself free and they both ran towards the sounds. The closer they came to it, the stronger the meaty stink of decay grew. They turned a corner and halted. Eli pressed a hand over his nose. The tunnel ended in a hollowed-out lair where the gigantic coiled form of a Skither lay lifeless, its grey tongue protruding from its mouth. Beside the beast’s head was a pile of human-breed corpses. Eli could see the marks in the sand where the Skither had dragged in its victims. They moved cautiously closer to the corpses. Suddenly, the Death reared up from behind the pile, its mouth bloody. It staggered towards them, spitting out chunks of dead flesh. It held out its hands and it noticed the gore dripping from them. Its sunken eyes stretched wide and Eli saw clear horror. The Death reeled and collapsed onto the ground.

  Eli stepped towards it, but Ev’r grabbed his arm and dragged him back. ‘Don’t you learn from your mistakes?’

  She went first and from a reasonable distance, extended her foot and nudged the Death. It retched and vomited violently, then collapsed again.

  ‘He’s sick,’ Eli said, squatting down beside it, shining the light over its body and face.

  ‘Really,’ Ev’r replied wryly.

  ‘Look,’ Eli said, noticing how the creature’s waxy, colourless skin blended with its shadow cloak. He leaned closer and saw an extremely faint bloodline mark – the triangular pattern of a Midnight Man, mixed with something else. Eli squinted. It was the green and brown scales of a non-venomous human-breed snake line.

  ‘Wow!’ Eli said, his fingertips tingling with the excitement of discovery. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. All the cross-bred Midnight Men the government executed were mixes with other spectral-breeds – none of them were outside of the race. Human-breed and spectral-breed are completely incompatible. How would it even happen without the human-breed getting killed?’

  ‘Artificial insemination – experimentation,’ Ev’r said. ‘You think babies are only made after people fall in love and get married, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Eli mumbled, though he had been imagining how the scene would look when a pleasant-faced human-breed girl brought a bloodthirsty, feral Midnight Man home to meet her parents. He examined the man more closely, noting his gaunt face and protruding cheekbon
es, his stick-thin arms.

  ‘He’s starving,’ he said. ‘He can’t feed properly.’

  ‘What do you expect from a mix like that?’ Ev’r replied.

  ‘Well he must be able to eat something; he’s survived this long.’

  ‘It’s because of the metamorphosis,’ Ev’r said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Eli shook his head.

  ‘Look at him – all that skin drooping around his face and neck. That’s the way the Midnight Men are before they mature. Before their changing time, they can get away with eating any kind of meat, but when they come of age, they have a day when they have to feast properly on the near-dead – then they change, but if they don’t feast they die. It’s a protective function of the species – only the strong survive. I would have thought someone like yourself, professing to be intelligent, would already know all this,’ Ev’r said with a sneer.

  ‘I never claimed to know everything about spectral-breeds,’ Eli said. His eyes returned to the prone man. ‘I don’t think he wants to eat the dead or near-dead. Did you see his face when he saw the blood? He was horrified.’

  ‘Sounds like his problem,’ Ev’r said.

  ‘He’s part human-breed, though.’ Eli spoke his thoughts aloud. ‘I wonder if the whole devouring near-death thing could be diverted somehow. Maybe he doesn’t have to eat dead flesh. It doesn’t look like it agrees with him anyway.’

  ‘A vegetarian Midnight Man?’ Ev’r raised one eyebrow. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Maybe we should take him with us and try to help him.’

  ‘Hell no,’ Ev’r spat. ‘You want to escape the authorities, find a cure for a Ravien-bite, defeat the Skreaf and drag an illegal, dying cross-breed along for the ride. What’s wrong with you?’

  The man’s eyelids flipped open. He stared at them and his mouth gaped open in a silent scream. His skin blended into the shadows of his cloak and he vanished completely. Eli saw the shadows stirring as the man ran through them, out of the chamber and out of sight.

  ‘Problem solved,’ Ev’r said. ‘Look at this bunch.’ She nodded to the pile of corpses. ‘They’re all Galleys.’

  Eli stood and shuffled nearer to the bodies, shining the light onto them, over their horn-shaped Galley bloodline marks and green clothes. Ev’r was right. They were Shawe’s men. Eli recognised the dead staring face of Shawe’s cousin, Malcolm, and a chill spread over his skin. His heart thudded faster. Copernicus, Diega and Silho were last seen being captured by Shawe – who had left the city and never returned.

  ‘Are they here?’ he squeaked, more to himself than Ev’r. He ignored the smell and started searching through the bodies. Each had dark stains all over their skin.

  ‘Dark magics,’ Ev’r said beside him. ‘Death-curses.’

  ‘Skreaf?’ Eli whispered.

  ‘Probably. The magics were strong enough to kill the Skither when it fed on the corpses.’ She pointed to something sticking out of the giant monster’s mouth. What Eli had thought was the creature’s tongue was actually someone’s arm. He gagged.

  He voiced his fears to Ev’r. ‘Maybe Copernicus and the others are here – dead.’

  ‘Hopefully,’ she said.

  Eli blinked back tears and then his logic kicked in. ‘I’ll run a test.’ He took the scanner from his pocket and set it to body shape. He keyed in the approximate dimensions of his boss and teammates, then ran the scanner across the pile of dead and over the Skither in case it had already swallowed them. The machine beeped – no matches.

  ‘I don’t think they’re here,’ Eli said, almost not daring to hope. He looked over all the dead bodies – at least half or maybe more of the Galley gang members must have been there.

  ‘We should bury them,’ he said. ‘It’s the human-breed way. They’d want that.’

  ‘I hate to be the one to break the news to you, Snack-size,’ Ev’r said. ‘But corpses don’t want anything, and we have to get out of here before the demons find us again. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.’

  ‘Let me at least cross them into the afterlife, then,’ Eli said.

  ‘Cross them?’ Ev’r sneered. ‘Since when were you human-breed?’

  ‘Never, obviously, but they’re human-breed so it’s the right thing to do.’ Eli stood in front of the bodies and crossed himself three times in the human-breed way.

  ‘Go to the ancestors,’ he said, not knowing what else to say. Something shimmering beside the corpses caught his attention and he bent down to examine it. He lifted up Diega’s silver coin, the Ory-4 in its morphed state. As he stared at the coin a possible sequence of actions played in his mind.

  ‘Shawe must have captured the commander, Diega and Silho. Then the witches attacked and killed the Galleys, and somehow the others escaped into the desert. Otherwise they’d be here. We need to search for them.’

  Ev’r shook her head. ‘Do you know how vast the Matadori is?’

  ‘Very vast?’ Eli took a guess. ‘But I have equipment —’

  ‘Which doesn’t work out here. Besides there’re no guarantees they are here, maybe the Skreaf took them. Either way, do you actually think the witches are going to wait for you to regroup with your little friends before they strike?’

  Eli had to shake his head.

  ‘Then let’s go.’ She held out her hand.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I’m not going back into the Murk. Do you know how much that hurts?’

  ‘We can travel the hidden path and it will take us seconds to get to the city or we can walk and it’ll take us weeks. What would you prefer?’

  Eli took her outstretched hand.

  ‘You have to want to sink in otherwise it won’t work,’ she told him. ‘No one unwilling can be dragged into the Murk, except through dark magics.’

  ‘I want to,’ Eli whispered.

  ‘Sure you do,’ Ev’r mocked.

  Eli gritted his teeth as the ground gave way beneath his feet.

  26

  Silho sat slumped on the speed-drift platform, staring up at the monolithic wall encircling Scorpia. Above the impassable black stone fortress, the upper levels of the city reached high into the sky, stretching up to Paradise and falling so far short. Silho heard voices from the wall calling her, dragging her in. Flashes of their memories intersected her thoughts. Her hands strained against the restraints and her skin froze, then instantly began to boil. Her heart began pounding frantically, then almost stopped. She trembled all over and gasped with stomach cramps that contracted all her muscles, making her double over with pain. She felt like smashing her head against the platform to knock herself out.

  The only thing that stopped her was the Wraith, Raine. The strange spectral-breed whispered constant reassurances beside Silho’s ear. Her voice was so soft and cool that it could have been just a breeze, except Silho knew full well there was no such thing as a gentle breeze in the Matadori. She shivered despite the heat and her restraints clanked together. The handcuffs binding her hands brought up a hazy memory of her father being dragged out of their house by soldiers. He’d been cuffed just as she was now . . . When her father was framed by the Skreaf and executed, we believed we’d lost the last Omarian . . . The truth spoken by the he-Wraith continued to reach her battered mind in degrees, spreading ripples of shock through her body. She had always believed her father was innocent, but hearing it from someone else . . . It removed all the whispers of doubt that had plagued her in the mid-dark when she’d lain wide awake chasing sleep. A second of unanchored euphoria fought through the pain, but almost instantly faded into hollowness because she was still here and he was still gone and there was so much left unsaid and so many questions unanswered.

  Silho returned her gaze to the wall and saw the commander walking back towards them. He had left her and the others waiting on the hover platform while he’d gone on foot to the Scorpian Gates to investigate the line-up of people stretching from the only official entry to Scorpia far back into the desert. When he was close enough to be h
eard, the commander shook his head. ‘Palace enforcers and Regiment soldiers are double-scanning everyone. They’re scoping for us. We have to find another way in.’ He stepped onto the platform.

  ‘What about the access tunnels into the Gangland?’ Shawe said from beside Silho, the taint of Araki heavy on his breath.

  ‘No good,’ Copernicus replied. ‘We need to get as close to the underside as we can, preferably inside Moris-Isles itself.’

  Shawe scratched his chin and the others sat silent in thought. Finally the gangster said, ‘There is a way directly into the Isles, but you’re not going to like it.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Copernicus said.

  ‘The Brown River. The main sewer line. It runs through the whole city.’

  Diega cursed under her breath.

  ‘If that’s the only way then we’ll have to use it,’ Copernicus said.

  Shawe gave a rumbling laugh and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. ‘The man who sweeps his room seventeen times a day and bleaches his underpants thinks he can handle swimming in other people’s —’

  ‘I can do whatever is necessary,’ Copernicus cut in. ‘Can you?’

  ‘You know it.’

  ‘Then sober up.’

  Shawe took a defiant swig from his flask, but then pocketed it.

  ‘Around the wall – that way,’ he said to Diega and pointed east. ‘I’ll tell you when to stop.’

  Diega glared at him, refusing to take his orders.

  ‘Do it, Diega,’ Copernicus instructed.

  ‘Yes, do it Diega,’ Shawe echoed with a smug smile.

  ‘Shut it,’ the commander snapped at the gangster.

  ‘Why is he still with us?’ Diega demanded.

  ‘Because you need me,’ Shawe said.

  Diega gave a nasty laugh. ‘Like a hole in the head – like a rash that won’t quit.’

  ‘You’d know all about that,’ the gangster bit back.

  ‘Copernicus – seriously, it’s me or him,’ Diega said.

  ‘I agree,’ Shawe said.

  ‘How about I shoot you both,’ Copernicus said, drawing his electrifier and pointing it at one and then the other. ‘We’re facing a demon army without any backup. I need soldiers, not squabbling children. You’re just slowing me down.’