Storm of Locusts

Chapter 45

I catch him in midair. He grunts in surprise, and we tumble through the sky.

I tear at his clothes, his metal wings, grappling for purchase. He screams incoherently and tries to pry me loose. We fall, spinning, unable to tell up from down, blinded by the torrential rain. It seems like an eternity until we slam into the earth below.

The rain has turned the red dirt around the guard tower into a mudslide, and the once firm earth slips out from underneath us, sending us down the side of the hill, straight toward the dam and the drop beyond. We both fight to stop. Nothing is solid, everything is chaos, and we rush unhindered toward the edge.

I can’t stop. I’m going too fast. I lose sight of Gideon as he tumbles past me. I try to scream, but my mouth is filled with mud. A river roars in my ears.

Something strikes me across the stomach, and I grab for it. Cold metal under my hands. A pipe of some kind, planted vertically in the ground. I hold on tight, drag myself up, struggling to get my head above the mudslide.

I’ve caught hold of the cross section of a guardrail, anchored down in the concrete observation deck. Another twenty feet and I would have slid right off the edge. I cling to the railing, wiping mud from my eyes and spitting wet earth. I look for Gideon.

He’s at the edge, slowing pulling himself along the same metal railing farther down. His face and hair are slicked red, the delicate lace of his wings clotted with mud, and his white clothes are stained ochre. He hasn’t seen me yet. I check my moccasin wrap, and my fingers close around the obsidian knife still tucked between the layers of suede. But before I can draw it, Gideon spots me.

His eyes narrow. He yanks at the air behind me, and the railing I’m clinging to rips free of its moorings. Metal piping slams into my back.

I’m sliding again, more controlled this time, head above the fray. I’m barreling toward the edge . . . until Gideon plucks me from the river of mud. Tosses me against the netting behind him—the last hope for those unlucky enough to fall from the deck. The flow holds me pinned, dangling out over the edge. The structure moans under the pressure, threatening to break at any moment.

“Where is the sword?!” Gideon shouts.

“Somewhere you won’t find it!”

He’s panting, leaning against what’s left of the rail. “Why are you fighting me, Godslayer?” He sounds truly bewildered. “Don’t you want to be out from under their thumb once and for all? Don’t you want to be free?”

“No! Free is lonely. Free is having no one who cares for you, no one who will sacrifice their own lives to protect you. Free is no one having your back even when you’re a solid bitch. I don’t want that kind of free!”

A vein throbs in his neck and his hand clenches. “Weakness. Dependency. Human frailty. Why wallow in your humanity when you can become a god?”

There’s movement behind him, out over the open sky. Something coming in quickly, a dark smudge in the sheeting rain, blurred and indistinct.

Gideon’s still staring at me, his breath coming is gasps, waiting for my answer.

“Because I’m just a five-fingered girl,” I say finally. “And I need other people.”

“They cannot make you whole.”

“They don’t have to.”

“Kai told me about you. How they treat you because of your power. You are a pariah. A monstrosity. They’ll never accept you!”

“You’re wrong, Gideon,” I say, thinking of Rissa on a curb outside of the Twin Arrows, the two of us laughing over a shared cup of coffee. Of Ben, her hands over her heart, calling me family. Of Kai, who loves me broken, dark, exactly as I am. “They already have.”

Gideon sneers at me. Raises his hand to rip the netting open and send me tumbling to my death. Behind him the figure in the rain solidifies. Jeans, Metallica shirt, eyes made of quicksilver.

A bolt of lightning streaks from the sky, striking near Gideon’s feet. He stumbles back.

Kai lands, putting himself between us. He lifts his hands, fingers pressed together, and then jerks them apart. The water crushing me recedes abruptly. I tumble to my hands and knees, exhausted. I want to rest, but I make myself move, crawling across the netting toward land.

Gideon’s eyes light on Kai, and he smiles. “You’ve come back, my son. I knew you wouldn’t desert me.”

“You’ve got to stop this, Gideon,” Kai says, his voice both storm-dark with power and full of pain.

“No, Kai. No. Do you see what you’ve done? What you can do?” He lifts his face to the rain. “More power than I thought possible. My God, boy. You are magnificent.”

“I don’t want the power,” Kai says. He drops his head, and when he looks up again, I know that his eyes have lost their uncanny glow.

Gideon’s mouth turns down in disgust. “Then what do you want? Not more sentiment, like the girl.” He sneers in my direction. Kai looks at me too, and I’m close enough now that he holds a hand out to pull me up. I get to my feet and we stand together, side-by-side.

“I want you to come back with us,” he says.

“Kai . . .” I start, but he touches my wrist, a plea, so I hold my tongue.

“This is your last chance, Gideon,” he says. “Terrible things have happened here. The Swarm, they’re all dead. And that can’t be changed. But it’s not too late for you. Come home with me. Meet my cheii. He can help you.”

“Help me do what?” he sneers. “Become the father you so desperately miss? So that you can disappoint me, too?”

Kai flinches, and a soft rage bubbles up inside me. “He’s giving you a chance to live. Take it.”

“He can’t give me anything,” Gideon spits, “except failure.” He flexes his shoulders, and his wings spread open behind him.

“He can fly!” I shout to Kai, but Kai’s already moving. He covers the distance to Gideon in three long strides and wraps his arms around him to hold him tight. Gideon freezes in surprise. Kai whispers furiously in his ear, his cheek pressed tight against Gideon’s, skin-to-skin. His right hand grips the back of his head. The older man’s eyes widen, a look of pure wonder on his face. Tears gather in his eyes. Kai rocks him gently in his arms, turning Gideon until his back is to me.

Kai’s voice has been too low to hear, but as he looks up at me over Gideon’s shoulder, I hear one thing, loud and clear. “Good-bye.”

And I know that’s my cue. I throw my obsidian blade. It lodges into the back of Gideon’s head, at the base of his skull. He doesn’t even scream.

Gideon slumps in Kai’s embrace, and for a moment, they stand together. And then the White Locust is melting, dissolving into thousands of locusts, all just as dead as their namesake.

Insect carapaces strike the ground, the sound of them hitting the earth lost in the steady fall of rain. They are caught up in the river of mud, and they wash down the incline to plummet off the edge to the depths below. I step out of the way and watch them go.

Kai drops his hands to his knees, head bent, dark hair dripping rainwater. I join him, bending to dig through the mess of bugs and mud to find my knife. I clean it and put it back where it belongs.

“You okay?” I ask.

It takes him some time before he straightens. He pushes his hair from his face. “It was too late for him. I should have seen it earlier. All this is my fault.”

“No, Kai. He made his choice. We all have choices.”

He nods, but he doesn’t look convinced.

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him his clans. Who his parents were. I told him he was loved.”

“How did you know?”

“Gideon had his own birth records. He just refused to read them, always too angry or afraid of what he might find. I took the liberty of reading them.” He squints through the rain, looking out of Glen Canyon. “I wanted to give him some peace.”

“Medicine People Clan.”

He looks over at me. “I’m sorry I asked you to do that.”

I shrug. “It’s what I do. Like you said, I am what I am. No use fighting it.”

He looks thoughtful before he says, “A monsterslayer.”

“Pretty good at it, too,” I say with a grin. “But it never hurts to have a sidekick.”

“I had it handled.”

“Sure you did.”

He chuckles and pulls me close. Kisses my forehead. We lean into each other as we turn to trudge back up the hill.

“So you can fly,” I murmur.

“Well,” Kai says, “it’s more like hovering, being held up by the winds—”

“And shoot lightning from the sky.”

“I can direct what’s already there if—”

“Kai,” I cut him off as we reach the top of the hill. “It’s badass. That’s all I’m saying. Very”—I glance down at his T-shirt, clinging to his wet skin—“very metal.”

He smiles, a little sadly but at least I know I haven’t lost him. “I saw you destroy an army of locust men with a lightning sword. That was pretty metal too.”

I raise a hand in a horned salute. He laughs.

“The others are in the guardhouse,” I tell him. “They need medical attention.”

“Others?”

“Rissa and Ben. Ben’s Hastiin’s niece. You’ll like her. She never listens to anything I say, and she’s got a catalog of old pop songs to torture you with. She’s fun.”

“Sounds like you’ve been busy.”

“Yeah. But it’s time to go home.”

“Yeah, Mags,” he whispers against my hair. “Let’s go home.”