Rapture's Edge

He clucked, disapproving, but it didn’t faze him. Silas smiled, a malicious specimen that pulled his lips flat over his teeth, and took a slow step into the room. “Probably not smart to antagonize the man holding the gun. However, you are incorrect. I was a servant—and a loyal one, at that—but now I’m something a bit more elevated, wouldn’t you agree? Your father’s death created a vacuum, my dear, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum.”

“My brother—”

“Your brother is a sock puppet.” It was hard, abrupt, and possibly louder than he intended, because his glance flickered to the doorway behind him before it settled back on her. “Not only is he unGifted, he’s a fool, unworthy of his position. Not even worthy of his name. Caesar, indeed. What a bit of wishful thinking that was! Didn’t it ever bother you, Eliana, that you were the one in the family with the brains but you were never allowed to be…anything…because you were a woman?”

He took another step forward, and she and Mel took corresponding steps back. He seemed to be enjoying this, their shock and patently obvious fear. His smile grew wider and more excited by the second.

“I would have changed all that, you know. I would have let you lead beside me. We could have made a glorious team, you and I.” His voice grew soft, while his eyes, ever dark and glittering, grew heated. “Unfortunately, I don’t team up with whores.”

He’d heard everything, then. It didn’t sting, him calling her a whore; it hardly even registered because she was too intent on formulating a plan for getting out of this that didn’t include getting shot.

She backed away another step as he moved closer. “What are you going to do?”

“I?” he replied with feigned innocence. “I’m not going to do anything. You, however, are going to kill your best friend.”

What?

She wasn’t sure if she spoke it aloud or not, but Silas answered as if she had, smiling his chilling, rabid smile all the while.

“Terrible how you just couldn’t adjust to our new life here. You never really got over the sudden death of your father, did you, my dear? Everyone could see how much it affected you. How depressed you’d grown. It won’t be much of a surprise when you finally go over the edge and kill your best friend, and then yourself. So tragic, really. Such a waste of life when we were on the verge of such momentous things.”

It hit her with sudden clarity, and she knew he’d be able to pull it off because he had a way of making people believe him. Mel’s dead body, her own beside it, his gun in her hand…she saw it with the detail of a photograph. How her kin would react with shock, how Silas would comfort them, how he’d use their grief to his own advantage and make them rely on him even more. He would kill the two of them, and no one would be the wiser to his treachery.

His callousness, his cunning, sent a surge of rage unlike anything she’d ever known singing through her body. There was a thrum of light and noise inside her, a sound like a thousand wing beats, a gathering that incinerated her fear and honed everything to a pure, crystalline sharpness.

Then Silas changed his aim and pointed the gun at Mel.

28 Katachi

Literally translated, budo means “way of the warrior”. It is more than a fighting system, though it is certainly that. An ancient samurai practice from Japan, budo is a way of life, a philosophy. It is an art.

The art of killing.

As with all art, there is beauty in it.

Eliana had practiced ritual katas at dawn for years. It was a way of assimilating herself to a new life, and a way of acquainting herself with the sun. For a girl born and raised underground who’d never glimpsed the sky until she was twenty-three years old, the sun had been a terrifying thing to her, a monster of heat and light suspended against a canvas of blue so vast it had no edges but bled off into infinity. She cried the first time she saw the night sky, but the first time she saw the sun, she cowered in terror.

She was a child of darkness. For her, daylight was where the bogeymen lurked, not in the cool, comforting arms of the night.

So she practiced in the garden of the ruined abbey at dawn, the rhythmic, calming flow of steps and turns and sweeping moves with her sword, until the rising sun was no longer a source of fear and her mind had sharpened, her spirit deepened, her muscles hardened from the girlish softness they once held. She practiced with a budo master who challenged her concentration and her form, and she became his best student. She never achieved katachi, however, that state when the repetitive mold-making of katas becomes perfection of shape and all training is aligned so you arrive at the calm center of yourself, weightless and magical, where movement is effortless, everything is slowed and crystallized, and you see with perfect vision what is all around you.

In this heightened state, even the intentions of others become visible. Their light moves ahead of them just before they do, and you can see what they are about to do.

In the hairbreadth of a second just before Silas turned his gun toward Mel, Eliana, at long last, achieved katachi.

It was instantaneous and unthinking. From one heartbeat to the next, she became.

A surge of energy crackled over her skin, and a wave of power, huge and pulsing, lit through her like dry kindling bursting into flame. Her sword was at her side, sheathed in its leather scabbard and hidden beneath her long coat, and then it was in her hand, sweeping up in a long, perfect arc with no more effort or concentration than it takes to inhale. There was no conscious decision; there was only action and reaction. The clarity of her vision supplied her muscles and nerves with everything they needed to move lightning-fast, invisible.

She lunged forward, and her feet never even touched the ground.

In a single, clean stroke, she lopped off Silas’s hand at the wrist.

Still clutching the gun, it went flying into the air in a spray of crimson and landed with the flat thud of meat against the wall. It fell to the floor, and the gun popped out from between the lifeless fingers and clattered against the bare stone.

He staggered back, stunned, mouth gaping, as blood from his severed hand began to run from the wound in a trickle, then a pulse, then a flood. He clutched his wrist with his other hand and backed away, then turned and ran, trailing blood in a long, dark smear behind him.

Then as quickly as she became, Eliana unbecame, and all the light and magic drained out of her as if a switch had been flipped.

She sagged against the doorway Silas had just been standing in and let out her breath in a gust. There followed a silence so profound it seemed as if the Earth itself might have stopped spinning on its axis and everything on it—every person and bird and insect, lacking gravity—had been flung out into the far reaches of space.

Then an odd sound, liquid and gurgling, broke the unnatural stillness.

Choking.

She whirled around and—no. No!

Mel was lying on her back on the stone floor, coughing up blood.

The bottom fell out of the world. Eliana dropped her sword and dropped to her knees beside Mel, her hands fluttering over the spreading stain in the middle of her shirt. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, she hadn’t heard the gunshot, she hadn’t seen the flash of light, it couldn’t be—

But then she smelled the sharp, lingering scent of gunpowder in the air, registered the swiftly widening pool of red around Mel’s shoulders, and she knew that it could.

“Ana.” Mel’s eyes were wild, rolling, one hand clutched at the front of her coat. “Ana.” It was almost lost beneath the horrid burble of the crimson tide that spilled from her mouth and bubbled from her nose. Her lung