Caris raised her hand in the direction of the peacekeepers, ignoring Blaine’s warning shout. She wasn’t reaching out in entreaty but in protest, and the starfire that exploded from her hand was a cascade of power that engulfed the weapons the peacekeepers held. She didn’t think about her actions. Perhaps she should have, but the peacekeepers weren’t there to help the citizens of Amari. They’d proven that when they let revenants loose in the city streets.
The rifles melted into liquid, and the peacekeepers fell back screaming, their hands blackened down to bone. Caris exhaled shakily, skin feeling too tight and dry, as if she were about to burst. Starfire danced at her fingertips, its heat something she barely felt.
Blaine caught her wrist, dragging her off the roof and down to the hood. She cried out, more because of the hail of bullets that passed through where she’d been than because of his rough handling.
Lore had dived off the vehicle, landing on the sidewalk rather than the street. Neither position was safe. Caris wrenched her hand free and sent another burst of starfire in the direction of the shooters.
“What happened todon’t use your magic?” Blaine shouted as he took aim at a revenant in the process of biting through a protestor’s arm two vehicles away.
“I’m sorry, would you like to become a pincushion of bullets?” Caris snapped.
The nerves behind both her eyes pulsed painfully, but she ignored the building headache in favor of opening herself to the aether in a way she’d rarely done before. Her control was better than it had been at sixteen, but she still lacked finesse.
But one didn’t need finesse in the midst of a riot.
One just needed fury—which Caris had plenty of.
She called forth starfire in a wave that burned through the revenants staggering their way over downed bodies. The dead went up in flames, screaming until they lost their voice and became nothing but ash drifting through the air.
Caris was dimly aware of people in the crowd staring at her, of the distant flash of a camera’s lightbulb going off. All she could focus on was the way her chest burned, cracked open like the tintype photograph of the dead girl Blaine had left behind with the duchess, exposed for the entire world to see.
Shouts reached her ears, and she turned her head, the world moving as if she were in water as the aether poured through her veins. She watched as peacekeepers ran down the sidewalk toward them, separated from the riot and revenants by parked motor carriages. Lore shouted something Caris couldn’t make out as she spread her fingers through the starfire.
She wasn’t sure if she could have killed them. That day, she didn’t have to find out what it felt like to take a life.
The sun was eclipsed by a shadow that spread all around them. The heavy sound of a Zip gun going off sent bullets ripping through the peacekeepers, tearing through them like paper.
Caris jerked her head up, taking in the sight of the airship descending fast above them, the roar of its engine nearly deafening. Crew leaned over its side, taking aim at the revenants below in the crowd with crack shot precision. The Zip gun on its aft side shifted its aim at the remainder of the peacekeepers by the paddy wagons, all of whom scattered.
A rope ladder was tossed overboard, its ends dragging on the sidewalk. Lore lunged for it, pistol forgotten behind her in favor of escape. Lore climbed with an ease Caris only hoped to emulate as Blaine yanked her off the hood of the motor carriage and toward their only way out of this mess.
“Climb!” Blaine yelled.
Caris gripped the rope rungs with both hands and started to climb. As soon as there was space below her, Blaine followed after her. He shouted something in E’ridian she couldn’t understand, voice carrying to the crew above. The rope ladder swung wildly as the engines changed pitch, the airship rising over the crowd. Caris peered down at the rapidly diminishing ground, watching as a revenant just missed the trailing knots of the rope ladder, falling back amidst the mass of bodies.
Bullets pinged off the thin metal plates shielding the balloon, ricocheting wildly. She wanted to close her eyes as the airship gained altitude, but clinging to the rope ladder wasn’t any way to stay safe. With the wind whistling through her ears as they flew over rooftops, Ashion growing smaller and smaller below, Caris put one hand over the other and climbed.
Lore reached the decking first and immediately leaned over the railing to offer Caris her hand. She was hauled to the relative safety of the airship, knees giving out on her once she was no longer dangling over open air.
Blaine needed no help in hauling himself over the railing. A crew member immediately pulled up the rope ladder behind him. Blaine knelt beside Caris, giving her a frantic once-over.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Caris could only nod numbly, warm despite the chill air blowing against her skin as the airship flew east. Her head hurt, but not as much as her heart, for she knew what she’d left behind.
“My parents,” she said, unable to stop the tears welling up in her eyes.
Blaine’s mouth twisted, but he didn’t try to placate her with false comfort. “I’m sorry, Caris. We can’t go back.”
She watched him stand and go to where Honovi leaned heavily against the flight deck’s doorframe. Blaine touched a hand to Honovi’s hip before kissing him with a fierceness she’d wanted to experience with Nathaniel. But she wouldn’t get that now, for he was as lost to her in that moment as the road she’d thought she’d been born to walk.
Caris pulled the ring Nathaniel had given her out of her pocket with trembling fingers, staring at the company crest engraved on it. Not a bloodline, but close enough. “I’ll find you. I swear it.”
Caris undid the clasp of the simple gold necklace she wore and slipped the ring onto it before hooking it around her throat once more. Then she pushed herself to her feet and walked across the deck on shaky legs, determined to find the answers to all her questions from someone who knew more about herself than she did.
In the city they left behind, in the wake of a riot and a revenant incursion, the broadsheets would blame the Clockwork Brigade for the terror perpetuated that day. The blame would be meaningless in the face of the front-page picture that would change the course of a future no longer locked in orbit like a comet—that of a dark-haired young woman wielding starfire in defiance of a purge that had not completely taken root two decades ago.
Some things, after all, could not be burned away.
