“Made them better? I don’t know.” Cheyenne swiped her hair out of her face and glanced at her blood-smeared palm.
Another scream came from within the fissure opening within the earth. The halfling spun and headed back toward the edge of the newest Border portal, trying to erupt through the grass. The multicolored light shimmered in suspension, and the dark tip of a black stone pillar rose slowly from within the crack. Nope.
Cheyenne reached out again for that tension in the earth’s energy. Her activator noted the difference between the energy of the portal stone and the earth around it.
“Cheyenne,” Maleshi said in a warning tone as chunks of shredded black metal hurtled away from the dome under her swiping attacks.
“If this thing comes through, we have a serious problem.”
“So don’t let it through!”
The half-drow let off a blast of crackling black energy straight down into the crevice at the first portal stone jutting through. The screaming intensified, and she hooked her magic around the earth’s resistance and pulled again. With a massive groan, the fissure in the earth shrank inch by inch. Cheyenne staggered back, pulling her clawed hands toward her and snarling with the effort. The ground shifted again, and a massive explosion behind her almost made her lose her concentration again. Heat and flashes of green light bathed her back.
A ray of the portal’s shimmering light erupted from the center of the closing fissure and shot straight up into the sky.
Maleshi delivered a final blow to the digger’s dome. What was left of the metal shell fractured and finally ripped away, sending black metal shards in every direction before they slowed in the air, suspended in the nightstalker’s and half-drow’s enhanced speed. The mechanisms beneath the dome’s shell burst into blue flames, and the digger let out a shrieking whine before that too cut out, and the broken machine lost power, crashing back to the ground. The nightstalker spun toward Cheyenne and saw the burst of light streak into the air. “You said you could stop it.”
The portal ridge fought back and opened the crevasse again by another inch, pulling the halfling across the grass as she struggled to maintain her grip on the earth’s energy.
“I’m trying!” A renewed wave of searing heat and tingling energy flashed from Cheyenne’s core. The black flames burned behind her eyes and across her skin, setting her human-illusion ablaze with drow fire.
Maleshi’s eyes widened. “Crown be damned.”
She leaped from the back of the broken digger, sent a bolt of silver lightning into the machine Cheyenne had ripped apart, and ran toward the halfling. “Just don’t let go, kid.”
“Ya think?”
For the first time in countless centuries, General Maleshi Hi’et recoiled with a cold wave of alarm when she heard Cheyenne’s voice, dozens of otherworldly tones speaking as one.
“Don’t just stand there!” Cheyenne shouted, oblivious to the many-toned snarl in a spectrum of pitches erupting from her throat. She shot Maleshi a sidelong glance, the black flames dancing behind her eyes and shadowing her pale human face in dark light.
Maleshi blinked, and her momentary hesitation disappeared. “I’m on it.”
The nightstalker’s fingers moved quickly as she muttered her next massive spell. Then she clapped her hands together and spread them apart with a blinding burst of silver and pink light. The same pink shield wall she’d put up around the original unmonitored portal ridge rose from the chasm against the portal’s shimmering light.
Cheyenne let out a final roar of effort and pulled with all her strength. Her grasp on the earth’s energy held fast, and the activator measured the width of the crack in slowly decreasing increments. The fractured sections of earth slammed together with a boom like a hollow metal drum below the ground, and the portal’s light behind Maleshi’s shield wall flickered, dimmed, and winked out.
The activator beeped in her head and flashed a new update in bright yellow.
Detected threat contained. Volatile frequencies returned to normal levels. Shield application holding at 99%.
The thing measures spell effectiveness too?
The second Cheyenne’s thoughts moved away from closing the portal ridge, the black fire along her skin snuffed out, and she staggered backward. “Damn.”
Maleshi hung her head and stuck her hands on her hips, fighting to catch her breath. “That should keep things where they belong, for now, at least. Not sure how well it’s gonna hold.”
“Ninety-nine-percent,” Cheyenne muttered.
“What?”
The halfling tapped behind her ear and brushed her black hair away from her face again, smearing blood from her fingers and palms across her forehead. “This tech has numbers for everything.”
“I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Yeah, well, maybe it’s just a halfling-using-O’gúl-tech-on-Earth’ thing.”
Maleshi snorted. “Sure. Maybe. Listen, I know this was a close call, but we need to do some serious cleanup right now before everyone else moving at normal speed starts seeing things they won’t be able to figure out.”
“I’m sure they already have.”
“There’s no reason to make it worse.” Maleshi worked one more spell and finished it by pointing with both hands at the pink wall of her shield. The light disappeared, leaving behind a jutting mount of ruptured and mostly re-sealed earth stretching in a jagged scar across the lawn on the VCU campus—that and the two wide holes dug by the war machines. “At least they won’t see that. Now, come help me move these damn machines.”
“You can’t make those invisible too?”
The nightstalker shot Cheyenne an unamused glance, her silver eyes flashing in the sun as they headed toward the broken machinery. “Of course I can. Gonna be a little hard to explain why a bunch of students and other staff keep tripping over huge, hard piles of nothing in the middle of the grass. We’re just getting these out of the way.”
“Right.”
Together, they hauled the broken, mangled carcass of the first O’gúl digger tank across the grass and between the Computer Sciences building and its neighbor.
“Right here’s good.” Maleshi released her hold on the machine’s outer shell.
Cheyenne
