Death Grip  •  Act 3

The hangar was in chaos when Spark and Vahaadi arrived on the scene. Soldiers and opterrans thrashed desperately against a horde of gliars. A misty pall of shifting distortion hung in the air, and amid the battle stood a young harlequin violinist, enraptured in her own tune.

Spark let out a war cry and hurled a firebomb at Serenadē. A veil of shadow rose to shield her. Serenadē opened her eyes and smirked at the superheroine.

“Just who I was hoping to see,” she lilted.

“Vahaadi, you do crowd control!” Spark ordered over her shoulder. “I’ll handle Miss Hideous Hennin.”

“Oh, yes, since that turned out so well for you last time.” Serenadē said. “Sure you’d rather not sic your djinni on me? He’s at least halfway decent in a scuffle.”

She and Spark slowly circled each other, watching for the first move.

“Why don’t you drop that violin, or I’m gonna have to get violent!” Spark said.

“Ugh. You’ve been waiting your whole life to say that out loud, haven’t you?”

Spark tried to hide her sheepish grin by igniting her hands in a showy threat. “All right, punk, let’s dance!”

“A dance, is it? I doubt you can even keep a beat.”

“I’ll give you a beatdown—!”

“Would you two just fight already?!” Vahaadi snapped over the din of his battle with gliars.

“Ladies first, then? Ooh. Looks like I’m the only one here,” Serenadē jeered. Her bow and violin morphed into a quiver and longbow and she unleashed a shot at Spark. Spark dived to the side.

“Did you just—?! OOH! You’re dead like disco, you jester jerk!”

They traded shot after shot, dodging and spinning around each other. Spark’s attention vacillated between Serenadē and keeping track of Vahaadi to avoid jerking his collar. As yet another of Spark’s shots sailed wide and collided with a support beam, Serenadē tutted.

“You should be more careful, you know. The distortion’s already done a number on this place. If you keep throwing explosives around like that, it’s going to collapse.”

Between the rippling distortion and errant blaster shots from the andalier soldiers, the hangar bore severe structural damage. Chunks of the floor had fallen away in places, revealing a dizzying drop of several thousand feet into the alien planet’s cauldron.

“The only thing you should worry about collapsing is you!” called a harsh voice, coupled with a vaporizing plasma blast. Serenadē ducked to avoid the shot as Vesper and her opterran mount appeared from the chaos. Another figure, unfamiliar to Spark but distinctive in his top hat and half-cape, also joined the fray, cutting down gliars alongside Vahaadi and Commander Seckna.

“So rude!” Serenadē gasped in mock insult. “You should be flattered to know that I came all this way just to see you. I’m not really supposed to be here, but I think I’ll be forgiven for wanting to finish off a few loretreaders. Isn’t it just my luck to see so many in one place!”

“Where’s the apocrypha?!” Vesper said.

“The apocrypha? Oh, I destroyed it weeks ago.”

Spark and Vesper shared a glance of dawning horror.

“WHAT?!”

“That’s—you’re lying!” Vesper raged. She took another shot, and Serenadē batted it away with a swipe of shadows. She smiled haughtily.

“You’d hope so, wouldn’t you? It took some time to get the fungus to mature. But now that it’s been through a few fruiting cycles, it’s spreading the distortion quite nicely! Just look.”

Serenadē gestured broadly, indicating opterrans throughout the hangar. Some had begun to display discordant behavior. Their large eyes dimmed and flashed like faulty lightbulbs. They staggered and pulled away from their pilots, careening drunkenly toward the walls and ceiling. The gliars no longer engaged the afflicted opterrans, sensing that their motives had changed, and instead focused their viciousness on the soldiers and remaining mounts.

“The poor little things are picking out their graves, now,” Serenadē said, watching as an opterran began its trek up the wall to its final resting place. Then she returned her maddening smug smile to Spark and Vesper and nocked an arrow. “Would you care to join them?”

Spark and Vesper tensed, preparing to dive out of the way of the oncoming shot. But, just then, Vahaadi let out a snarl nearby. He’d taken sentry atop his magic carpet in front of a cowering opterran and was fully engaged in repelling gliars. He didn’t even notice the Distortioness swing her bow toward him and fire.

“Vahaadi, move!” Spark gasped. She dove at him, shoving him right off the magic carpet. The arrow meant for him tore through Spark. A sensation she could only assume was death ripped through her. Her superpowers snuffed out at once, absorbing the death blow and lending their last breath of energy to keep the girl’s flame of life alight.

The arrow’s momentum threw Krissy’s barely-conscious body toward the crumbling precipice of the hangar. She landed hard and rolled a few times, drawing on muscle memory she’d learned from years of sports to protect her vitals while her jumbled thoughts fastened only on Vahaadi’s safety. When she at last skidded to a stop, she lay stunned for a few seconds, just to be sure she was still breathing.

She pushed herself up with a weak groan. Through the haze of pain, she found a translucent chain stretching from her fanny pack. On the other end, Vahaadi struggled to recover his bearings as he clutched a broken arm. Their eyes met, and Vahaadi stared at her in bewilderment.

A resounding crack beneath her jolted Krissy’s attention.

I’m gonna fall! Krissy realized in a panic. She had neither the time nor the strength to stand and run to solid ground. The floor sank a few inches with the grinding of metal. The chain pulled.

She tore the lamp from the fanny pack and hurled it to safety as the platform gave way beneath her.

Vahaadi scrambled onto his knees, casting his eyes around. There—his carpet—out of reach—no time—as if in slow motion, his gaze brushed across Sabo’s, just as the loretreader glanced up from his own fray with the gliars. Realization struck them both.

She’s going to die.

This is it.  

Then Vahaadi’s eyes jumped to the lamp beside him—the lamp she’d thrown to safety after taking an arrow for him, after kissing his cheek and promising she’d never drag him on purpose…because she knew it hurt.

And through the chaos of warring emotions and half-formed thoughts, a terrible notion materialized.

Lord Ifrit, I hope my head doesn’t come off.

Pushing off with his hardly mended arm, he lurched to his feet, running a few steps before forcing his physical form to vapor and plunging over the edge. Seckna swore in shock. Vahaadi’s smoky form collided with Krissy and he re-solidified, crushing her against his side with his good arm. He gripped his collar with the other hand in the vain hope of cushioning the force of the sudden stop. In the last second of free fall, he rasped, “don’t let go!”

Krissy clamped on tight, and the chain went taut.

Unmoved even by the full weight of an adult djinni and a human teenager, the lamp remained rooted in place on the edge of the hangar while the chain swayed wildly underneath. Krissy screamed into Vahaadi’s shoulder. The hand he’d clenched around his collar had spared Vahaadi decapitation, but he’d earned himself a throat punch that mangled his larynx and shattered his jaw. Still he held tight, choking raggedly as gravity pressed the collar deeper into his neck.

He wouldn’t die or even pass out—his contract wasn’t that merciful.

Sabo watched the thrall disappear over the edge, aghast. With a bark, Commander Seckna vaulted onto the back of the nearby opterran and urged it over the precipice. Sabo ground his teeth and started toward the lamp, but a distortion arrow splintered at his feet. He rounded on Serenadē.

“Oho, you should know better than to play with me, little cricket!” he roared.

He ripped out the rapier concealed in his cane and ran at her. Serenadē changed tack, shifting her longbow and quiver back to their instrument forms and launching into a tense melody as he closed the distance between them. Gliars swarmed around her to engage the one-eyed loretreader, but they were a poor match for Sabo’s flashing blade.

As he pressed closer through the throng, Serenadē’s song intensified further into a double time rhythm and piercing high notes. Infected opterrans scaling the walls shuddered, and the lights returned briefly to their hollow eyes. Sabo experimentally pressed his attack harder, forcing Serenadē to maintain the fervor of her cursed music in retaliation, while he watched the opterrans from the corner of his eye. With certain notes and cadences, the opterrans reacted with cognizance.

“Gotcha,” Sabo hissed through his leer.

He laughed in triumph and began to all but plow through the horde of gliars. “This is a game you can’t win, girly!”

Serenadē retreated, her expression dipping for once into real dismay. She let out a short scream when he darted with impossible speed through the final line of defense and brought his blade down over her. Her song ceased, and her violin morphed into a haphazard shield. Sabo rained blow after blow on her, forcing her to block as she backed away.

With a clever feint, Sabo managed to bash the edge of the shield with his forearm, sending it spinning from Serenadē’s grip. Serenadē gasped and attempted to break away, but the wall behind her transformed into an eerie stone statue like an oversized chess piece and seized her, hauling her right off her feet.

Sabo flipped a knife into his hand. Serenadē flinched in terror, but he flung the blade to his right, impaling an infected opterran. The blade corkscrewed into the opterran’s carapace, expanding and warping into a large wind-up key. The opterran jerked erratically, now under an altogether different thrall than the fungus. It raised its wings and began a keening melody.

The infected opterrans recoiled at the sound, thrashing and tossing their heads. Their eyes flashed and they whirred in pain, but, gradually, clarity and light flickered into their eyes, and they joined in with the song. The pall of distortion looming over the hangar began to fade.

“What are you doing?!” Serenadē shrieked.

“Any abomination you can work with music can be undone with music,” Sabo gloated, looking out over the hangar. “Songbird’s distortions aren’t as foolproof as he’d like to think.”

He turned suddenly on her, slamming his fist into the wall beside Serenadē’s stone captor. Terror returned to her features as he leaned right into her face. But when he spoke, it was without his usual domineering leer.

“Your world needs you, Missy,” he growled quietly. “Go home.”

Serenadē stared at him. Sabo stepped back and snapped his fingers. The stone figurine melded back into the wall, dropping Serenadē. She landed with a little gasp, ducked, and fled, disappearing into a rift of shadows.

Seckna landed the commandeered opterran hard, jostling her two rescued passengers. Krissy clenched her legs against the opterran’s sides to keep from sliding off and tightened her hold on Vahaadi, who she held cradled against her while he coughed and gasped brokenly into her shoulder. He would be mortified about it later, but, for now, it was all he could do to focus on breathing while his contract repaired the would-be-fatal damage to his neck.

“Thanks for coming,” Krissy whispered into his hair.

“What happened?” Seckna demanded, dismounting and striding toward Sabo and Vesper while she took in the bizarre scene of singing opterrans and utter lack of one Distortioness.

“You let her GO?! Why didn’t you kill her?” Vesper snarled at Sabo.

“Not my style, lady,” Sabo said without looking at her. He retrieved a deck of cards from somewhere beneath his half-cape and snapped one of the cards into his hand. The face of the card lifted from its surface as a sort of dust, which he blew toward the opterran he’d possessed. The dust flowed around the opterran’s wind-up key, dissolving the strange object before filtering into the remaining wound. With a sluggish click of its mandibles and an inquisitive whirr, life returned to the opterran, and it ceased playing. The other insectoids carried on without it, filling the hangar with the eerie thrumming.

“I don’t give a tick’s earlobe about your sty—”

“This song the opterrans’re playing,” Sabo said to Commander Seckna, ignoring Vesper. “Make sure it’s heard in all the districts. Seems to be the counter-melody to whatever corruption the Distortioness worked on the fungus. Should neutralize it, and the distortion will wane with time. Without the apocrypha, that’s as good a solution as we’re going to get.”

“Very well,” Seckna said.

“O-oh!” Krissy blustered over Vahaadi’s head as Seckna readied to leave. “There’s a tyrannoterran running rampant in the Gamma district! And a scavenger named Drorg that really needs help. He’s stuck under some crates in an alley on the third loop out.”

Seckna nodded, and she swiveled on her heel and stalked away, barking orders. Vesper scowled at Sabo, but followed her commanding officer.

At their departure, Sabo’s odd squared-iris eye shifted appraisingly onto Krissy. “You all right there, ponytail? Thought we were gonna lose you.” There was just a touch of a growl in his voice.

“I am now,” Krissy said. Other than a deep fatigue, there was no sign of the distortion arrow or the path it had taken through her. It was a miracle she could only attribute to the cocktail of superpowers a certain djinni had granted her—some kind of instant regeneration, at the cost of burning out her transformation. She rested her cheek against the top of Vahaadi’s head. “I’m a lucky girl.”

Vahaadi’s breath had at last deepened and evened to a manageable rhythm, but he was too humiliated to move, yet—embarrassed in one measure for being held like this, and in another, for finding it soothing.

“Lucky’s right,” Sabo said, and he cast a cool look at Vahaadi before tipping his hat and sweeping off toward the lorecircle. Vahaadi’s insides churned with shame. Without looking at Krissy, he pushed himself out of her arms and slid off the opterran’s back.

Krissy hopped down after him, swallowing a bite of a Chuckle bar a little faster than she’d meant.

“Hey, hang on, are you OK?”

“You should have let me take that arrow. You know I would have survived it.”

Krissy scowled with worry. “Listen, Vahaadi…I know you’re tough and everything, but…I’m not just gonna let you get beat up. I’m a hero! That means I save people. Including you.”

Vahaadi stared at her. An uncomfortable sensation rose in his chest. Guilt? Wonder? He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I don’t need saving,” he managed, at last.

I can’t be saved, remained unspoken.

Krissy and Vahaadi returned to Rosetta halfway through fifth period. Despite her highly plausible story about realizing she’d forgotten her ADHD medicines and returning home only to get distracted by a new comic shop in town, Krissy was still—as she described to Vahaadi—“mega-grounded.”

She wasn’t the only one who had to answer for what they’d done that day.

“What are you waiting for?!” Sabo demanded, his booming voice echoing off fences and houses on the dark alley behind the Cliffords’ home. As usual, his loud presence was inexplicably muted to all but Vahaadi. “Why do you keep saving her?!”

Vahaadi glared at him. “Vesper was right there. She might have suspected something if she’d seen.” It was a paltry argument, but Vahaadi was unwilling to attribute the rescue to anything else. “If this goes wrong and I end up back in that pit, you have only a lifetime to regret a missed opportunity. I will have an eternity.”

“You’ve got a power unlike anything in all the canons. The Distortioness didn’t know what she was dealing with when she released you. You think I’d let the loretreaders get in the way? No. I’ve got too much to gain from you, Golden Eyes. Now, think. There must be some weakness we can exploit.”

“She’s not allergic to a mineral deposit from her home-planet, if that’s what you’re hoping.”

Mr. Sabo stared at him. “Was that a Superman reference?”

Vahaadi cleared his throat. “I spend an inordinate amount of time hearing about comic books, all right? I thought I might learn something about her wish that I could use.” He ran his hand through his hair, frustrated. “But there’s nothing you don’t already know about. She’s hyper, impulsive, and…utterly delusional,” Vahaadi finished softly, thinking of her trust in him—a trust he didn’t deserve. He shook his head. “Truly, her greatest threat is herself. She’s just so blind…”

Sabo straightened suddenly, but he wasn’t looking at the djinni. His single eye stared into nothing, and, for once, his smile had gone, replaced with calculating realization.

“That’s it.” Sabo’s grin crept back into his face, and he wrung his cane between his hands, looking for all the world as if he were strangling the thing as he paced past Vahaadi. “Oh, that’s brilliant. Similar enough…Yes, it might be just enough to wake her. And Spark would never survive that.”

Vahaadi felt a chill thrum through his stomach and up his spine.

“How do I know you really intend to free me?” he asked over his shoulder, his voice quiet, but edged with challenge.

Mr. Sabo’s hand cuffed his shoulder, spinning Vahaadi to face him. Vahaadi tensed, then gasped as Mr. Sabo jerked him forward by his padlock. The large loretreader leaned in close to Vahaadi’s face as he produced a silver key from the lining of his sleeve.

“Listen closely.”

Vahaadi’s eyes darted between the key and Mr. Sabo’s face, then closed, and he held his breath as Mr. Sabo inserted the key into the lock.

Click.

The lock turned.

“Help me kill your mistress,” hissed Mr. Sabo, “and I will set you free.”

The lock was open. If Vahaadi could just wrench away from Mr. Sabo and rip the collar off, he was free—but his body balked, the way it always did when he thought to harm his master, or attempted to move his lamp, or whenever he tried to act against his contract.

Click.

The lock turned back, and Mr. Sabo released him. Vahaadi retreated a step, clutching his lock and feeling strangely violated and sick. It was the real key, then, not some hoodwink, and the aggravation that Vahaadi couldn’t even move to touch it roiled his insides.

As if reading his thoughts, Mr. Sabo dangled the key in front of Vahaadi’s face. Vahaadi made no move to snatch it from his hand. They both knew he couldn’t.

“Now, about that deal…”

“What do you want?” Vahaadi asked, and there was an air of fatigue in his voice. “Perhaps it’s something I can give you without a wish…”

“Haha! What do you care? Whether you’re my servant or hers, nothing changes for you, eh, Thrall?” Mr. Sabo grinned, parroting Vahaadi’s own words back at him as he circled around the djinni. “Ohhh, unless…you’re starting to like her.” He rapped Vahaadi on the top of his head with his cane.

The sharp tap shredded the last of Vahaadi’s patience. “No!” he said, pupils thinning to slits, and smoke curling from the corners of his mouth. “I don’t care about any of you mortals!”

“Then prove it,” Sabo countered. “One wish is all I need, but a wish it must be. And that means we have work to do. What’s it going to be?”

A pregnant silence filled the alley.

Finally, Vahaadi spoke.

“I will not intervene again.”

Sabo smiled.

“Then we’re agreed. Go to your mistress. You’ll be free of her soon…”

Vahaadi’s eyes lowered broodingly, and his fingertips brushed his cheek where Spark’s kiss had touched him, as if he could rub it away. Setting his jaw, he sublimed to smoke and whisked off into the air and through the open crack of Krissy’s bedroom window.

Sabo’s gaze lingered after him, his skull-like smile stretched wide over his face. A feminine voice emanated from Sabo’s form, though not from his mouth.

“Ah, Vahaadi… Despite being such a deceitful traitor yourself, you have a terrible time detecting one.”

There was an impish giggle, and Sabo wilted, held aloft only by strings. With a soft clatter of limp, wooden limbs, the puppet Sabo vanished.