Crucible Zero Read online

  The smile pulled his lips away from his teeth and tightened the corners of his eyes. He gripped the gun a little tighter, and his breathing quickened.

  Shoot me, I thought. It would hurt like hell, but that would be the last of the Shelley dust bullets. If he used it on me, he couldn’t use it to finish off Foster. Foster already had too many bullets working to kill him. But none of them were in his head. Maybe Foster would survive.

  Slater held his breath, and I held mine.

  But then slowly, slowly, he lowered the gun.

  He strolled toward me in measured steps, shoes a solid thump against concrete. He stopped so close, I could feel his breath on my cheek as he whispered in my ear. “Do not think you can tell me what to do.” He shifted the gun and shoved it up under my sternum so hard, I grunted from the pain.

  “Do you feel that?” he asked. “That is your death. I will pull your guts from your body with my bare hands. And I will end your agony only when your wretched screams please me. You and I are locked in this game,” he said, “locked in time together. But I will hang you by your bones and bathe in your blood.”

  He slammed his fist into my stomach, and I yelled as ribs cracked.

  “Where—” He slammed his fist into me again: the same damn place. “Is.” Slam. “The.” Slam. “Watch.”

  I was dizzy with pain. Blood covered the back of my throat and dribbled down my chin and from my nose. He’d broken more than ribs. I was bleeding inside.

  Even if I could get enough air into my tortured lungs to give him an answer, I wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction.

  “No?” he whispered close to my cheek again. “Then let’s see what will loosen your tongue.”

  I tried to pull myself up straight, but my stomach and ribs were throbbing with pain. Bones felt like broken glass shifting around inside of me, catching and cutting.

  I was strong. But, holy shit, so was he.

  “Is this the thing you want, Matilda Case?” he asked.

  I blinked until the sweat cleared from my eyes. I expected him to be standing over Foster again. But he was beside Abraham, one hand gripping Abraham’s hair tight, yanking his head back, the other pressing the gun against his temple.

  “This man, this collection of old flesh and spare parts? Is that what you will risk your life for?”

  Abraham’s eyes were open and fixed on me. He didn’t appear to have any new injuries.

  “Do you love him, Matilda?” Slater asked. Then yelled, “Do you love him?”

  That was a Shelley dust bullet pointed at Abraham’s head.

  That would be enough to kill him.

  I’d seen him almost die from Shelley dust before.

  I couldn’t do that again.

  “No,” I said.

  Slater’s eyes narrowed, and he bared his straight blunt teeth. “Then I could shoot him, and you wouldn’t care?”

  I didn’t say anything. Abraham’s gaze held mine.

  Abraham knew I was lying. He knew I was trying to save his life.

  But maybe nothing I said could.

  “Slater,” Abraham said.

  “Shut up!” Slater yelled.

  And then Slater pulled the trigger.

  Abraham jerked, trying to duck the shot, but the gun was too close.

  I yelled as blood sprayed back, covering the floor. Abraham slumped sideways in the chair. Slater yelled and fired again and again, even though the chamber was empty.

  There had been only six bullets. He’d unloaded five of them in Foster and the last in Abraham.

  Abraham wasn’t moving. The left side of his face was a mess of blood and muscle and bone.

  That son of a bitch had killed him.

  Rage fueled a fire in me. I yanked the cuffs, straining to break the shackles. But Slater was no fool. He knew just how much restraint was needed to keep a galvanized pinned.

  This wasn’t how it was going to end. I wasn’t going to let Slater rule this world or any other world.

  No.

  Not again.

  Never again.

  A motion on the floor caught my gaze.

  Foster shifted his hand. His eyes begged me to stay silent. In his hand was the watch. His body was full of Shelley dust, and I knew it was undoing him, dissolving his stitches, destroying his organs. But he closed his hand around the watch, asking me.

  I nodded.

  Yes. Yes. Yes.

  He summoned the last of his strength. His massive hand was pale and shaking, his breathing ragged. Foster squeezed the watch, crushing it until metal collapsed and gears ground down.

  The world swayed.

  Then reality exploded and fractured into a thousand different shards, shattering me with it.

  A great bell tolled like thunder, driving rose-scented rain over me and the sound of my screams. I didn’t know if destroying the watch would work to change the world. I didn’t know if I would be lost in this chaos of times, or if I would ever find my way home again.

  But right now, all that mattered to me, the only thing I wanted, was to kill Slater.

  In this timeway—for however long it lasted—in this brief space between time, I was free, the shackles gone.

  A thousand views of the room, the world, spun around me: broken, bloody, empty, rubble, burning, torn. A thousand different times slipped past me like spinning disks.

  I didn’t even try to make sense of them.

  Slater was the only other fixed point. And he was the only thing I was fixed on. He stood across the room, his back toward me.

  He turned.

  I pulled the syringe out of the breast pocket of the leather jacket Abraham had given me, tucking it into my palm. My movements were nightmarishly slow; every action I took seemed to fill a thousand years.

  I ran for Slater. I ran to end him. To kill him. Now and finally.

  Each step was a struggle, as if time dragged against me, pulling like gravity, as reality shattered and shattered again, dragging me toward the bell that echoed its own peal, a cacophony of forevers.

  Slater lifted a different gun.

  The watch was broken. If it was the relic, I could kill him. He could kill me.

  I heard him yell as he squeezed the trigger, felt the hot agony of the bullet strike my chest. Once. Twice.

  I kept running, would never stop running, anger and hatred pulsing through me.

  He had killed my family. He had killed my friends. He had destroyed my world and destroyed the only time and reality I could call home.

  Abraham was bleeding, dying. Foster was breathing his last breath.

  I would not abide living in any time, in any world where Slater was still alive while they were not.

  Breaking the watch should have severed the circuit of time pouring between Slater and me. But maybe Welton had gotten that wrong. Maybe the circuit would be broken only when one of us was dead. Or maybe the watch wasn’t the key. Maybe it was my grandmother’s life.

  I would never sacrifice her. I could never hurt her. This had to be the answer. This had to work.

  And so I ran.

  “Matilda!” A voice called out over the bell, my name echoing and repeating into a song I could not escape.

  Slater must have heard it too. He turned to look at the same moment I did.

  And there, standing at a distance and a simultaneous nearness my mind refused to comprehend, was a small, white-haired woman. Grandma. A great wind blew her hair behind her like a wing, and in her hands was a knitted scarf.

  In my time, my reality, she had been able to stitch up bits of time into a scarf I had used to freeze time. If Welton’s theory was true, her ability to do that suddenly made more sense. It wasn’t the little pocket sheep that gave her time, but the fact that she had been at the very heart of the time experiment, at the crucible zero o
f when time had both broken and mended.

  She pulled on the scarf stitches, unraveling the cloth. If that scarf was anything like the one she’d given me in my timeway, it would pause time.

  “Now, my sweet,” she said, her voice softened by distance and yet so near, it was startling. “Now.”

  Slater wasn’t moving anymore. He was frozen in front of me, the gun still raised.

  All time, all chaos, was frozen, still and silent. The only things moving were me and my grandmother, whose hands steadily ticked away each stitch like the second hand of a clock, the pulse of the universe captured in the thread of her life.

  I ran. My feet were no longer trapped and hobbled by time. I was wings. I was freedom. I was death.

  I stopped in front of Slater. Stood squarely in front of him.

  “This is for Robert, whose body and life you stole.” I stabbed the syringe into his carotid artery. “This is for the innocents you killed.” I forced the plunger down.

  Then I pulled the gun out of his hand. “And this,” I said, pressing the barrel against his forehead, “is for me, you son of a bitch.”

  I unloaded the clip into his skull.

  The bell pealed, an infinite sound that filled me with the scent of roses.

  Slater convulsed and fell to his knees, dead before he hit the ground.

  I spun, looking for my grandmother. Was his death her death?

  She was gone, whisked away by the swirling chaos of times streaming by fast. Too fast. Just like I would be whisked away.

  I threw myself toward the reality I had fought for. The reality so many had died for. Before I knew if I had reached it or not, the world drained down a great hole, and I was gone.

  * * *

  I was standing, a gun in my shackled hand. Across the small, cold room where we’d been imprisoned, Slater lay on the floor. He was not moving. He was not breathing.

  A pool of blood spread in a wide circle around him. The syringe of Shelley dust was buried in his neck.

  I didn’t know if he was dead. Didn’t know if that small amount of Shelley dust and the bullets to his brain would kill him. I strained against the shackles, afraid he’d rise again.

  The bone in my left wrist snapped, and I yelled. But the shackle broke free from the concrete. I threw my weight into it, and broke the right shackle free.

  I fumbled with the other restraints at my waist and feet, my broken left hand tucked against my ribs. Abraham was slumped, still chained in his chair. Foster lay unmoving on the other side of the room.

  I wanted to go to them to see if they were still breathing, but I had to know that Slater was dead.

  I limped over to him, the bullets, shattered ribs, and broken wrist sending shots of pain through me with every step.

  I didn’t have a weapon to kill him with.

  But I didn’t need one.

  I crouched over his prone body. He lay facedown. He might be dead. Well, I intended to make sure.

  I gripped the gun in my right, unbroken hand, and slammed it into his head, pounding until bone cracked, until blood and brains stained my fist.

  Galvanized could be revived as long as enough of our brains remained intact.

  I methodically made sure there wasn’t anything left of Slater.

  “Hold it right there,” a man’s voice said. “Put down the gun, and step away from the body.”

  The voice broke my grim thrall, and I blinked, suddenly aware of the gore around me.

  “That,” I whispered, “was for Welton and Oscar and Abraham, and all the other people you destroyed, you sick bastard.”

  I heard several sets of footsteps behind me. I put my hands out to my sides, stood, and turned.

  The heavily armored guards carried enough firepower to take out a city block, but they were wearing dark blue uniforms, not the orange I’d seen the other guards wear.

  The change of color seemed important, but I couldn’t figure out why.

  “Gun. Down.” The guard in front repeated.

  I knelt, set the gun on the floor.

  I was numb, my mind still scattered across the chaos of time, skittering away from the brutal chore of Slater’s death and the fear that Abraham and Foster were dead.

  It would be easy to fall into the madness that pulled at me with stiff fingers.

  Is Abraham dead? Is Foster?

  I had fought for this world. I had fought for them.

  I had lost. Too much. I didn’t want to lose them now.

  “Matilda Case?”

  I looked up. Realized I’d been standing there in a daze for more time than I could track.

  I had never met the man in front of me, but I knew instantly who he was.

  Hollis Gray, Oscar’s conniving, ruthless brother who had stopped at nothing, including killing his own brother, to secure his place of power among the Houses.

  But that was my time. In this time, he was head of defense for House Water.

  What was he doing here behind House Fire walls?

  Sallyo stood behind and to the side of him, her eyes flicking with approval over the grim spectacle surrounding us.

  “Yes?” I said, my voice too quiet in the quiet of the room.

  “Will you please follow me? There are some matters we need to take care of.”

  “I won’t leave them,” I said. “Foster. Abraham. I won’t leave them.”

  Hollis looked me up from boots to scalp. I knew I was covered in blood and gore—my own and Slater’s. I was shot, broken, and maybe a little crazy. But I’d saved the world.

  Again.

  For the last time.

  The guards stood aside so that medical people could enter the room with stretchers and packs of equipment.

  “We will let the doctors tend to the galvanized,” he said. “And to you. Please, if this . . . event is to be handled quickly and quietly, so that peace may remain intact between the Houses, you need to come with me now.”

  Sallyo nodded at me, imperceptibly urging me to accept his offer.

  I had never trusted Hollis in my world. Even Oscar had admitted to not trusting him in this world.

  But there weren’t a lot of other choices in front of me.

  “Are they alive?” I asked.

  Hollis glanced at one of the doctors, who was easing Abraham onto a stretcher. “Yes,” the doctor said. “But they’ll need to be taken to surgery immediately.”

  “There is nothing more you can do for them at this time, Ms. Case,” Hollis said. “Let us care for them. And for you.”

  I nodded stiffly and watched the medical team heft Abraham and Foster out of the room, moving as quickly as they could. And then I followed, with Hollis and Sallyo and all their guards at my back.

  * * *

  “I want you to know that I appreciate your part in this conflict,” Hollis began, once we were settled in a small but posh room halfway across the city. We’d gotten there by an underground road that had taken me to a room where a doctor stitched and bandaged me and set my hand in a splint. Hollis and Sallyo had remained with me. I asked to see Foster and Abraham, and had been told they were in surgery.

  We’d left that building through a garage, driven in a car with darkened windows, and given code words at two checkpoints before we’d arrived here, at what I assumed was Hollis’s office.

  I was still numb, bloody, and hurting. I just wanted this to end.

  “What part in what conflict?” I asked, unable to sort through the deals and double crosses from the past few days. My voice still didn’t sound right in my mind. Probably because so much of me was silently screaming over Abraham’s looming death.

  Sallyo stood near the door as any good bodyguard should, while Hollis, in his impeccably tailored shirt, trousers, and long jacket, leaned back away from the desk he was seated behind.

&nb
sp; “Several months ago, it came to our attention that Slater was manufacturing a new strain of the One-four plague. The new strain, One-five, was devastating in its effects and the speed at which it killed—or did much worse—to people. When the heads of the sub-Houses in House Fire began to die of the plague, we were naturally curious as to the man who seemed to benefit most from their death.”

  I watched him, and I heard what he was saying. Slater had been doing a terrible thing. Killing people so he could get what he wanted: power to rule.

  But the numbness inside of me was spreading. I wanted to walk out of this place and never see a House or House ruler again. I wanted my farm, my brother, my grandmother. And I wanted Foster and Abraham alive.

  “We did not have the proper . . .” He paused to consider his words. “Equipment to kill a galvanized. And we were uncertain who among the galvanized might align with our needs. While I apologize for the subterfuge of sending Sallyo out to your property to bring you into this, I am very pleased you were willing to take care of this urgent challenge we faced.”

  Urgent challenge was the nicest thing anyone had ever called Slater.

  “You planned this? Me killing him?”

  “I planned for Sallyo to get the letter. I had hoped Abraham would accompany her, and that if you were the woman he had been searching for, that your safety would become his priority. He was once a great leader of the galvanized, you know. A hero whom they followed.”

  “I know,” I said quietly.

  “What I am telling you, Matilda Case, is that you can walk free. I know my brother, Benik, would welcome you as a part of his unique team. I would also like to extend to you an invitation to serve House Water, if you would care to.”

  The only thing I cared to do right now was to go home.

  “Where is my brother?” I asked.

  “He sent a message to Coal and Ice.”

  Hollis was the head of information in this world. He undoubtedly knew what that message said.

  “And?”

  “He was upset by your decision to continue on to House Fire without him. He mentioned that his patient is in full remission.”

  Gloria was cured. That was an immense relief. Quinten really had found a cure. That would change the world. He would change the world.