Of Blood and Bone (Chronicles of The One #2)(70)

The gate ripped open, metal crashing, sand heaving.

“I guess that could’ve been quieter.”

“Considerably. Next time you’d flow away the sand.”

Recognizing her mistake, she puffed out her cheeks, blew out the air. “That would’ve been an idea. Anyway.” She walked through the gate, across more sand, a kind of dry beach where trucks and equipment floated.

She studied the wide steel door. “Here, I would blast. Go in fast. I’d hope we had some inside intel, have a sense of the layout inside, but fast. There must be another door, maybe more. Back, sides. Same deal there. Go in fast, all directions. They’d be armed, so you have to neutralize—that’s my dad’s word—as many as possible as fast as possible, and shield the prisoners, get them out. That’s the mission. Get as many people being held out and to safety as possible.”

She looked at Mallick. “Can I blast it now?”

“Yes.”

She wiggled her shoulders, rubbed her hands together. “Here’s some birthday fun.”

It came in a lightning force, hot and potent. And felt damn good. Stress she hadn’t known she’d carried released in a single, brutal punch.

The steel doors blew open.

“Boom, boom!” A little giddy, she stepped in.

Without power, the building held dark, but the sunlight poured in through the doors. And the first body—the bones inside a scorched and tattered uniform—lay only a few feet from the entrance.

“Oh God. Oh God.”

“Lights.” Mallick gripped her hand. “With me. Lights.”

She shuddered through it, joined her power with his to create a pale green glow.

In it she saw another door behind the remains, one of bars inside thick glass. Through it a security center, a guard station. And more, many more dead.

Skeletal remains slumped in chairs behind blank monitors. They spread on the concrete floor blackened by some ungodly fire.

Mallick released her hand, opened the barred door himself. He stepped through, turned to her when she didn’t follow him.

Pale in the charmed light, he noted, with her eyes dark and shocked. Not just by the dead, not only, he knew, as he, too, could still scent the stink of dark magicks trapped inside for years.

He nearly took her hand again, took it to take her home again, away from the dead and the dark. But that was the weakness of his love for the child, not the duty of the chosen to the Savior.

“This you must face. War—and it was, is, and will be war—brings death. Death by man or magicks. In war you will cause death, by your sword, by your power, by your orders. To be just, to be wise, to be strong enough to bring death, you must face it, see its costs.”

She trembled, but went through the door.

More doors, she thought. Dozens and dozens of steel doors lining the concrete walls. An open stairway leading to the second level and still more doors.

She made herself walk to one, though it felt more like swimming than walking. She opened the viewing slot, looked through the reinforced glass. No more than eight feet wide and deep, the windowless cell held a toilet bolted to the floor and a narrow bunk with the bones of whoever had curled tight on it.

Anger rose through shock, and she blew open the door, then another, another, so the crashing of metal to stone boomed and echoed. Some of the dead had been restrained to the bunks. Some had been children. All had been alone.

Rage shoved through anger and, on a furious cry, she threw out hands and power. More doors crashed open, some strongly enough to crack the steel.

“They’re still trapped here. I can feel them.” Her voice tore with outrage. “Can you feel them?”

“Yes. I can feel them.”

She yanked the dog tags from a body on the floor, gripped them tight in her hand. “Show me,” she commanded, shutting her eyes. “Show me.”

She saw him, as he’d been.

“Sergeant Roland James Hardgrove, U.S. Army, attached to Operation Roundup. Commanding Officer Colonel David Charles Pickett. Age thirty-six. Married, two children.”

Gripping the dog tags, she pushed.

“He would tell them they were taking them to safety. If met with resistance, the use of force, deadly force when warranted. Those were orders. A soldier follows orders. His team brought in the last group. Two men, three women, two minors. The boy, about eight, reminded him of his son, but he had orders. He’d completed the transfer, the paperwork, and was heading to the mess hall when he died.

“Orders. He followed orders.”

She dropped the dog tags, walked to one of the scorched walls, laid her hands on it.

“Others will follow mine. I have to face death to order it, to send others to meet it, cause it. Then let me see. Let me see what turned light and life to death and dark.”

“Fallon, you’re not ready to—”

She snapped her head around. Her eyes, nearly black with power and fury, blazed. “On powers within, on powers without, I call. Show me now and show me all. If my duty brushes the dark, then the curtain I will part. And I will hear and feel and see. As I will, so mote it be.”

Too much, Mallick thought, too much. But the die was cast.

Her body jerked, her head fell back, and her eyes went dark and blind with visions.

Voices screamed in her head, weeping, wailing, begging.

“Too many, too many. I can’t hear. Oh God, so many.”