“You shouldn’t go out there.”
The half-drow was already racing through the halls as fast as she could, trying to see through the furiously blinking lights in her vision. Multiple classroom doors flew open as she passed, letting out streams of panicked students and faculty, all scrambling to get out of the building. That’s not gonna help anybody.
The activator’s warning flashed wildly, filling her view with scattered descriptions she couldn’t read while she focused on not falling flat on her face or being shoved against a wall by fleeing students. That yellow arrow’s getting bigger.
An earsplitting groan rose from beneath the laminate-tile floor, bringing louder screams and more scrambling people into the halls. Then something loud cracked and split outside. Through the sliver of open door quickly shutting behind the last group of students to run outside, she saw a brilliant flash of multicolored light, punctuated by darting streaks of silver. “Shit.”
The thump of a body hitting the wall around the corner in front of her made Cheyenne pause. Then a woman with dark hair in a rainbow tie-dye dress barreled around the corner and froze as the front door of the building clicked shut.
“Maleshi.” Cheyenne raced toward the nightstalker posing as an IT professor, stumbling forward when the ground trembled again and brought another wave of startled and terrified screaming from people outside and inside the building. She steadied herself with a hand against the wall and swiped her hair out of her face. “Did you feel that?”
“Yeah, I felt it. What the hell’s happening out there?”
“There’s something coming.” Cheyenne blinked against the bright flashes of warning messages darting across her vision.
“I meant what specifically, Cheyenne.”
“I don’t know.” The blaring alarm returned in her head with full force, and she doubled over at the sudden deafening pain bursting through her head. “Enough, already!”
“Hey. Look at me.” Maleshi almost fell into the halfling when she staggered toward her over another buckling earthquake. “What’s wrong with you?”
Cheyenne pointed at her ear. “Activator.”
“Seriously?”
Warning: Threat detected at the surface six yards southeast.
“Dammit. It’s already here.”
“Cheyenne.”
“I said, I don’t know! Come on.” The halfling pushed away from the wall and darted toward the door, zigzagging across the hall as the ground bucked from side to side. Maleshi hurried close on her heels, and they both pushed the front door open before stumbling out into the bright mid-morning sunlight.
Two enormous mounds of dirt churned twenty feet from the front of the Computer Sciences building, ripping up grass and earth and sending huge clods flying through the air. The spinning corkscrew tips of O’gúl tunneling machines burst through the surface, the mechanisms roaring as the powered war tanks breached and toppled forward out of their tunnels.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Maleshi growled.
Students, staff, and faculty screamed even louder at the foreign contraptions of glistening black metal made their way across the lawn, spinning and rumbling forward as they churned and kicked up more grass and earth. Cheyenne hardly noticed the deafening chaos beneath the new rise of earsplitting alarms setting off one after the other in her head.
And the activator’s yellow arrow didn’t center on either of the O’gúl war machines.
“There’s something else,” she muttered, swiping twice across her vision just so the activator would get the message and turn off the damn alarms.
“Besides those things?”
“Yeah.” The yellow arrow flashed brighter and brighter before a massive crack split through the earth between the two holes from which the tunneling machines had emerged. The ground shuddered again, and the fissure splintered toward the Computer Sciences building, rending the air with crack after deafening crack like magnified gunfire. Another blaze of shimmering light streaked with purple and green burst from the center of the widening chasm. “Shit.”
“Just say it already!” Maleshi snarled.
“It’s another portal.”
“Did the activator tell you that?”
“No, but I’ve seen it before. I’ll handle it. Can you deal with the machines?”
Maleshi shot her a quick glance. “That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard you ask.”
“Great.”
Chapter Seventy-Four
Cheyenne darted into drow speed and raced away from the front door toward the splintering crevasse widening on the VCU campus. A fraction of a second later, she saw Maleshi enter the same plane of enhanced speed, hiking up her dress with one hand, slashing at the hem of it with her four-inch steel-like claws that had burst from the other, and running straight for the rumbling war machines.
The diggers only slowed against the magicals’ enhanced speed until Maleshi reached them. As she brought her claws arcing down toward the blinking blue lights flashing at the spinning top above the corkscrew spiral of the first machine, the contraption turned its mechanical sights on her and unleashed a spray of green fire.
Maleshi dodged the attack with a hiss and brought her claws up against the side of the war machine instead. A grating screech of metal on metal erupted on contact, sparks flying. “What the hell? Since when did these things start moving as fast as us?”
“No clue,” Cheyenne shouted, skidding to a halt beside the suspended burst of magical light rising from the crevasse. “You still got it?”
The digger groaned and opened a four-inch metal panel on its side before ejecting a rod tipped with razor-sharp pincers and spraying a burst of yellow magical attacks this time. Maleshi brought her claws down on the rod and severed it like a chef’s knife through an onion. “Quit asking me and do whatever you need to do, kid.”
The second war machine turned and headed toward the first, powering up for something clearly more intense with a low whine that quickly rose to a high warning pitch.
“Yeah.” Cheyenne studied the crack in the earth and the light shimmering slowly in suspension. Just reach out and feel for it. You’ve done it before.
She closed her eyes and slid that sixth sense
