Fate’s Pawn

The sound Miles heard as Roland and Lucas crashed into one another was like a giant clapping. It was a thunderous meaty slap that shook the roof and hit Miles like a gust of wind. Roland and Lucas were flung away from one another with a speed that terrified Miles.

They’d met near the center of the building and were still nearly thrown off opposite sides of the roof. Miles was running to Roland’s side instantly. Roland hit the guard wall with bone-shattering force, smashing a spider web of cracks into the stone. The top half of the wall crumbled, leaving Roland hanging over the edge.

Miles dove to grab his friend’s leg and only barely caught him. He hauled Roland back onto the roof with strength granted by panic. As soon as he had Roland safely on the roof, he turned to see what had happened to Lucas.

There was a similar hole in the wall on that side, but pessimism told him what was going to happen next. Sure enough Miles caught sight of Lucas’s hand clutching at the ledge and only a moment later Lucas was dragging himself back up to the roof, his jaw hanging, dislocated, to one side but it still somehow looked like a smile of triumph.

Miles grabbed Roland’s limp arm and thanked Fate and Destiny that the door leading into the hospital was close by. Roland was heavy but adrenaline could do amazing things for a person. Lucas was coming for them, not as fast as before but still a lot faster than Miles was carrying Roland, as Miles slammed the door shut. He snapped shut the lock and dragged Roland down the stairs.

Thanks to gravity’s help, he’d made it down two flights by the time that he heard Lucas’ pounding on the door above. He looked around, desperate for a place to hide and realized that there was no way he could make it carrying Roland. Options flitted through his mind like frenzied birds, but none of them would get them both away. He heard the door beginning to give under Lucas’ beating when finally an idea hit him.

If he could get Roland far enough away, he could lure Lucas away and maybe, just maybe, Roland would survive. Miles was nearly certain that it would end with Lucas pounding him into a bloody paste, but it was the only plan that let them both have a chance to live. He just needed a place to hide Roland. Only one option presented itself.

Miles pushed Roland up until he was hanging over the guardrail of the stairs. He held on for a moment, worrying that Roland’s inhuman fortitude had run out or was only active while he was awake, but up above the door crashed open and Miles had to let go.

Roland plummeted down along with Miles’ stomach. There was too much crashing coming from above to hear Roland hit the ground, and Miles didn’t have time to stay and listen. It was time to make some noise.

Miles slammed his body into the door leading out of the stairwell and let out a pent up scream as he went. He had to convince Lucas to follow him, that he was running scared, without a plan. Luckily he didn’t have to act all that hard.

The floor he was on was familiar. It was where he and the others had been placed when they’d come back from the forest. Miles feet carried him down the hall and to the first turn he found. He’d barely slipped around the corner when he heard Lucas’ psychotic laughter behind him.

The hall was full of doors on both sides. He kicked open one door, letting it swing freely and knowing it wouldn’t shut completely on its own. Then he moved to the opposite door and slipped inside. He kept the handle from clicking and held his breath.

Outside he heard pounding feet as he cowered beside the door frame. His heart was pounding in his ears; his whole body felt slick with sweat. But just as he’d hoped, he heard Lucas smash his way through the other door.

He knew he wouldn’t have long. It wouldn’t take Lucas more than a minute to search the other room, and this was the most likely place for him to search next. The worst part was that Miles was pretty sure he’d gotten most, if not all, of his speed back. He’d used every advantage Roland had bought him to get this far. Now he was all alone.

Fear that had become familiar rose up in him, threatening to overtake his mind. Miles wanted to curl up and cry. He wanted his heart to just stop, to spare him the pain of whatever Lucas was going to do when he caught him. He’d been in terrifying danger so many times in the last few days, but this was the first time that he’d faced it alone. Every other time he’d had Raziel or Hoeru or someone else beside him, standing in front of him, ready to give their lives to try and protect him.

He felt like such a coward. He wasn’t fighting for someone else, just for himself. Everyone else was so much braver than he could be, and he had no idea how they did it. Not one of them had run when Mask had shown up at the tower. All he’d been able to do was get Kusa, and that hadn’t even worked. Maybe if he hadn’t been so afraid, he could have come up with a plan, thought of something to stop Mask, but he hadn’t really cared about that in the end. All he’d wanted when it came down to it was to survive.

Miles gritted his teeth and bit his lip hard, focusing on the pain. It brought him back to the moment, centered him for a precious second. He couldn’t block out the fear, so the only option was to use it. Raziel could get away with doing stupid things without an ounce of fear, but Miles couldn’t. All he could do was keep it from controlling him.

First thing. Find out what he had to work with. He put his hands in his pockets desperately wishing that he’d been able to get his pack back. In one pocket he had the memory crystal with his mother’s image in it. In the other he had some chalk and something like a marble.

On realizing that was all he had to work with, his first several thoughts were that he was going to die. He clubbed those down and forced himself to think. That was the one advantage he knew he had over Lucas. Even on his best day, Lucas wasn’t nearly as smart as Miles was. All he had to do was set a trap for Lucas.

A plan came to him, sudden and complete like someone else had thought of it for him. He only needed the chalk and a bit of luck. He just had to get away for a minute or two to make it work.

Lucas slammed against the door so hard that Miles felt it through the wall. He smashed his face against the door’s window, smearing it with blood and grinning like a fiend. He peered in, and Miles could see that the white of his eye had turned completely red. Miles scrambled away, but Lucas took his time opening the door. He eased it open and stepped calmly inside. He started to speak only to notice his dislocated jaw. He casually reached up and popped it back into place with a crunchy crack.

“Hi there, Miles,” he said, like they’d happened to meet on the street. “How’s it going? You seen Roland around?”

“L-Lucas… don’t…”

“Don’t what? Don’t tear your fingers off? Don’t make you eat them?” Lucas was advancing at a glacial pace, the way a cat might inch closer to an unsuspecting bird. Miles was on his butt crab-walking away, but he knew that the wall couldn’t be much further back.

“I won’t hurt you Miles. Not if you do what I want.”

“Wha-what do you w-want?” Miles said, almost screaming as he found the back wall. He pressed himself hard against it, trying to sink into it. The memory crystal dug painfully into his hand, but he couldn’t make his hand loosen around it.

“I just want your friends. Especially Raz. I need to talk to them. Dad thinks they know things. Things that can help. I just need you to take me to them.”

“I-I-I-I-”

“You what?” Lucas roared, a flash of frenzied hate crossing his face like lightning, only to be replaced by the somehow more terrifying calm. “You’ll have to speak clearly. If your tongue isn’t working I might just have to pull it out.”

“I d-don’t know w-where they are,” Miles said.

“You don’t? Not any of them?” He was only a couple of feet away now, still easing closer with every passing moment, leaning in to stare at Miles with his mismatched red and white eyes, both open far too wide.

“Not even Roland?”

Miles choked, his throat clenching around words he couldn’t let himself say. He knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Lucas wouldn’t let him go if he led him to Roland. But he wanted to live. His teeth chattered, a sound matched by the clinking of the crystal in his shaking hand against the ground.

Lucas looked down. He pointed at the crystal.

“What’s that?” he asked. Miles instinctively pulled his hand up and held it to his chest.

“Show it to me!” Lucas screamed, bloody spit smacking into Miles’ face and sticking to his glasses. An idea came into Miles’ mind, like a light coming on. He hated it, but something told him it was the only way he could survive.

He slowly lifted his hand, keeping his hand closed until it was barely six inches from Lucas’ face. Lucas grabbed his wrist and shook his hand ferociously. Miles closed his eyes and, as he opened his fingers around the crystal, he grabbed his fear and poured the magic of it into the crystal all at once.

The crystal wasn’t designed to contain energy like that. In fact, it was almost full to bursting just holding the memory. Normally he only let in a trickle for fear of breaking the crystal. His mother’s face erupted into the air with a flash was bright enough to turn his vision red through his eyelids. Burning heat seared Miles’ palm as the crystal failed to contain all the energy and exploded. His mother disappeared.

Lucas screamed and crushed Miles’ wrist in his hand. Miles shrieked as he felt the bones in his wrist buckle and grind together. But Lucas’ grip on him only lasted a moment. He let go to grab at his own eyes and face, and Miles scrambled away.

The pain was worse than anything that Miles had ever felt. He felt sick and weak, and all he wanted in the world was to curl up and die. But he knew that if he didn’t run, Lucas would oblige him shortly.

Lucas flailed about wildly, grasping blindly for Miles, but Miles was already at the door. He slammed through it and ran down the hallway, gasping in pain as his wrist flopped about with every motion. At the end of the hall was the room he was looking for.

There was a reason they’d been kept on this floor when they’d been brought here under suspicion of corruption. This floor didn’t just have rooms designed for observation. There were other rooms designed for containment.

Miles bolted down the corridor, trying to keep from being blinded by the pain in his arm. The door he wanted was at the end of the hall. It was the main office where the keys to the containment rooms were kept.

The moment he was inside he knew he had a problem. It was too dark to see anything. There were no windows to let in even ambient light.

Miles panicked, sure that Lucas would be in the room with him at any moment. There would be no escaping him then. He started to fumble about the walls, trying to feel for a key hook or something. His bad hand collided with something hard in the dark, and for a moment the pain pushed every thought out of his brain. He felt bits of the crystal that had embedded themselves in his palm and fingers dig in even further at the touch. A thought occurred to him like a whispering voice.

He knew it would hurt and it might not even work, but he didn’t have any other options. He reached out with his mind and found the broken bits of the crystal in his fingers. Even to his magical senses, they felt jagged and broken. Even so, he willed magic into them, feeding his pain into the pieces. The pain grew as the crystals leaked energy in the form of heat, searing his hand, but a hazy dim light illuminated the room.

His hand was even worse than he’d thought, covered in blood and beneath that parts of his skin were burnt black. On top of that, there were dozens of tiny splinters of crystal stuck in his hand.

There was no time to think about it. He didn’t think he’d bleed out before Lucas caught him, though that might be a mercy. With the light he quickly found a wall with dozens of numbered keys hanging from hooks. He grabbed one with the number nine on it, remembering that room being close by.

He steeled himself to open the door, telling himself that Lucas wouldn’t be right on the other side of it. He didn’t believe that so he told himself that the longer he waited the more likely it was to be true.

Lucas wasn’t on the other side of the door. He was down the hall and looking right at Miles. His face had looked bad before, but it was ruined now, every bit as burnt as Miles’ hand and covered in even more, larger crystal shards, like needles on a cactus. In a fair world, Lucas’ would have lost both eyes to the explosion, but his left blood red eye seemed to be in perfect working order.

Lucas cackled and charged. Miles squeaked and scurried down the hall. Thankfully the windows let in enough light for him to see the numbers over the doors. He’d been right that room nine was close by. He opened the door and stepped inside. Again he willed magic into the crystals in his hand, long enough to get a picture of the room in his head.

It was a clean, mostly bare room. The room was divided by a wall with a door that had a barred opening at about average head height. Miles let the light die and stepped to the door. It took him barely a moment to get the key in the lock and turn it. That moment nearly cost him his life. He had barely slipped into the room and slammed the door shut when Lucas came in. There was a heavy, incredibly reassuring clack as the lock closed.

Lucas slammed into the door with a terrifying boom. He smashed into it again and again trying to batter it down. Miles didn’t have time to think about that.

He pulled the piece of chalk out of his pocket and knelt on the ground. He quickly drew a large circle on the ground around him. Symbols danced in his head as he desperately tried to keep them straight in his mind. He had to put them in precisely the right spots or the whole thing would fail. He couldn’t spare the energy to use his hand for light and using magic like that inside the circle might ruin the whole process. He’d have to draw the entire thing blind and hope he didn’t make any mistakes large enough for the whole thing to fail. Luckily he only had to use one rune over and over again for the plan to work. At least he was pretty sure that would make it work.

He drew and drew and tried not to jump every time that Lucas smashed against the door. It took him less time than he expected which was more worrying than relieving. He tried to think what he could have left out but something told him there was really only one thing left to do.

Miles slowly stood, trembling all the while. He wished desperately that there was some light so he could check his work. He took a deep breath and steeled himself, trying to will the quiver out of his voice.

“Y-you know you can’t break that door down, right? You might as well just g-go away. It’s made to stop people like you,” he said. The noise from the other side of the door stopped. There was only the sound of Lucas’ heavy breathing while Miles clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

“One way or another, you’re going to die tonight, Miles. If you open the door, I’ll make it quick.”

“I’m sure that will make your dad really proud of you,” Miles said, hoping and dreading in equal measure that his words would touch a nerve. The sudden and complete silence told him that he had.

“What did you say?” Lucas growled from somewhere in the dark.

“I bet he’ll give you a pat on the head and a piece of candy,” Miles said swallowing. He knew there was more he could say. He knew a lot about Lucas when it came down to it. He couldn’t help it. Lucas was the main source of torment in Miles’ life. It only made sense to know as much about the guy as he possibly could. He knew there was one subject that was guaranteed to set Lucas off. He knew it because he’d never heard anyone say a word about it in front of Lucas. There were volumes to be read into that kind of obvious silence. All that was left was to say the words. “It’s more than you’ll ever get out of your mom.”

Miles felt the temperature in the room rise. Lucas didn’t say a word. He smashed his face against the barred window, something Miles could see only because there was already light coming from the fire sprouting in Lucas’ belly. He screamed with rage, and the bloody flame his magic gathered howled towards Miles.

Miles stepped back, out of the circle, activating it. He threw his good arm in front of his face as the heat of that flame scorched the air. The air seared his mouth and nose as he tried to breathe.

But the fire did not touch him. It flowed into the circle and was trapped. It hurt his eyes to look, but Miles still needed to see, to be sure. Inside the circle where twelve copies of the same rune that glowed brightly as they gladly accepted the magic poured into them. It was the rune for reception.

Lucas’ magic poured into the circle with all the power of his rage, but all of it was trapped in that one spot. A column of roiling crimson flame blazed within the circle. It spun like a tornado and pressed against the limits of the circle but could not escape it.

The heat of the fire could though, and Miles scrambled to get away from it. He pressed himself into the corner, trying to curl away from the broiling heat of the flame. He’d known he must be forgetting something.

He squinted, trying to see Lucas. Lucas was still at the door, the look on his face no longer one of rage. It was one of panic. The flame wasn’t exactly pouring from his mouth now either. Instead, it was being pulled out of him. He was clearly trying to drag his face away from the bars, to halt the flow of his energy, but just as clearly he was held in place.

Miles only watched for a moment or two before the heat became too much for his eyes. In that brief glimpse he saw Lucas’ puffy face beginning to sink in, his cheeks going hollow and the skin tightening around his eye. He was screaming. At least for a few moments.

When the heat finally began to die, Miles risked one last glance. He only caught a glimpse of Lucas’ face. He wished he hadn’t. Lucas looked like a man that had been left out in a desert for months, a corpse that had been completely desiccated. But Lucas looked back at Miles with eyes that were still alive. Alive and pleading.

The fire burned for a little while longer within the circle, but with its source gone, it began to fade. Miles was left in the growing gloom with just his pain to keep him company. He felt suddenly weak and so very tired. He slumped to the ground, grateful for the somehow still cool stone against his burnt cheek. He felt something in his pocket digging into his leg. He reached for it, held it up to the dying light, and recognized it. It was one of the jewels that had been embedded in the walls of the prison beneath the tower. His vision swam. Darkness swallowed him then, and he was grateful for its embrace.