Trapped

Impervia turned to the rest of us and mouthed, Wait; listen. Annah and I obeyed. The Caryatid didn't. She gave her flames a moment to finish charring the last of the curds (filling the air with the smell of meat as the Keeper's face roasted), then she and her fireball moved forward. We hurried after her, fanning out so we weren't easy fodder for a single burst from an Element gun. Even Annah moved off on her own, wearing Impervia's too-big coat and cradling the Element gun in her arms. When I tried to tag along behind her, she waved me off: all her concentration was focused on the room before us, eyes and ears straining for any sign of trouble.

So we moved forward-like a platoon in enemy territory, walking silently in a line between trees. In our case, the "trees" were giant steel generators, two stories tall, their cooling fans motionless. The sparse lighting proved the station still had power, but it must have been coming from batteries; the turbines had all run dry.

With so many individual turbines and so many pillars holding up the roof, the Keepers would have had plenty of places to hide for an ambush; but apart from the single corpse, there was no one left in the room. After a while, I realized the Keepers must want to avoid a firelight in the midst of their machinery: Element guns could damage the generators, or even bring down the ceiling. That would be disastrous, especially since this equipment was virtually irreplaceable-the turbines were OldTech originals, bearing the names of defunct manufacturers, covered with a hundred coats of paint, jury-rigged with patch-wires, emergency welds, and other obvious repairs to squeeze a few more years from antique rust-heaps. A battle in this room might put the final nail in the coffin of machines that were ready to be junked anyway.

How long before this whole place ground to a halt from its own obsolescence? A few years, no more. If Jode had possessed any patience, the blasted Lucifer could have sat back and waited for this plant to stop on its own.

But that wasn't Jode's way. A passive approach wouldn't produce nearly enough death and suffering.

I tightened my grip on the Element gun and continued forward.

The far end of the chamber held another doorway… or rather a hole knocked into the room's original wall. This wasn't the work of Sebastian-this hole had clean edges painted the same green as the rest of the place. I suspected the hole had been dug when the Sparks took over the power plant, whenever that was.

The opening was three paces wide and the same distance high, hidden from other parts of the room by nearby turbines. I appreciated the concealment. The Ring of Knives were somewhere to our rear; by now, they must have picked up Element guns of their own, plucked from the hands of dead Keepers. Our only protection was staying out of sight: scuttling into the hole in front of us before Elizabeth Tzekich could catch up. I had the strong suspicion we were retreating down a dead-end passage… but staying put was certain suicide.

Jode and Sebastian were somewhere ahead. No doubt Dreamsinger was too-since she hadn't joined the ambush at the elevator or taken a stand to prevent Jode from reaching the generator room, she must be farther on, protecting something even more important. An electric cage full of Lucifers? I didn't know… but I'd soon find out.

The hole in the wall led to a tunnel dug into Niagara bedrock-limestone, cold and gray. Rubber-coated cables as thick as my arm had been strung down the tunnel: dozens of them lined the walls, spaced a hand's breadth apart and fastened to the rock on ceramic insulator mounts. They obviously fed power from the turbines to whatever lay ahead… and when the electricity was actually flowing, this tunnel must have been saturated with an awesome magnetic field induced by the inevitable fluctuations in so much current. I didn't want to think what would happen to a living creature who wandered into the corridor while most of the energy of Niagara Falls coursed through such a small area. Is there such a thing as death by magnetism?

Now, however, the power was dead. Not just because the Falls were shut off: each of the electric cables had been severed cleanly near the mouth of the tunnel… thick strands of copper sliced as easily as if they were melted cheese. It had to be Sebastian's work-even if the Falls resumed their flow, the power lines wouldn't be repaired any time soon.

The tunnel had no built-in lights, so we were forced to depend on the Caryatid's fireball-like Moses and the children of Israel guided by flame through the desert night. The fireball's blaze would give us away to anyone watching from farther up the tunnel… but I was willing to take that risk. My nerves were too frayed to creep through pitch blackness into the mouth of heaven-knows-what.

Anyway, the people watching from farther up the tunnel turned out to be dead.