Like animals, Fallon thought. Even the babies caged like animals.
“We’re going to get you out. Those of you who can fight, move out and to the left when we get the doors opened. We’ll get the others to safety.”
She gripped Duncan’s hand. “Help me.”
They joined, power to power, purpose to purpose.
“Magickally sealed,” he murmured.
“Yes, I feel it. But we have more.”
At her call, Tonia, blood splattered on her thick jacket, joined hands with them.
The glass began to hum, to ripple, to vibrate.
“Open, not break. There the locks, here the key. Turn the key to set them free.”
The glass moved, a fraction, an inch, a foot, section by section, row by row.
People poured out, supporting, even carrying others. Some ran to the children, gathering them up, weeping. Over the clash of voices, languages, Fallon pitched her own.
“Stand together! We have to move quickly!” She noted more than a dozen walked to the left, prepared to fight. “Hold on to the children, the infants, the injured.”
“Where will we go?” someone cried out.
“Arlington. They’re waiting for you. Stay together, trust the light. Take them,” she said to Tonia. “With Greta and Mace, as planned.”
“We’ve got it.” With the two other witches, Tonia focused power. “We’ll be back,” she said, and flashed the rescues.
Fallon walked to her father, laid a hand on his arm to heal a wound. “Give them weapons. Lead them. Take this house.”
“Your standard’s going to fly over it tonight.”
“Secure the prisoners in the cells. We’ll be bringing another.” She looked at Duncan. “It’s time to cut off the head. Are you with me?”
“You know I am.”
She took his hand, spoke in his mind. His brows shot up.
“You know where he is?”
“Yes. They rehearsed only last week. The bunker’s magickally sealed, so—”
“Together.”
“Together.” She pulled the location into her mind, flowed it into his.
Light sparked from their joined hands as they stood, eyes locked, mating power with power. Her blood hummed with it, all but sang as the link flowed through her. She felt his heart beat inside her own. And so, that merged light peeled away the layers of the dark.
Then it burst.
While prisoners herded into the cells they’d used to cage others, while troops rushed out to fight, she flashed with Duncan.
Hargrove stood in a small room behind four armed men and a thick steel door. Like the officer in the lab, he wore black, more uniform than suit. Medals glinted across the chest, gold braid wound at the cuffs.
His shoes shined like mirrors, those of a man who never walked through the dust and mud of the city he’d claimed as his own.
His eyes went wild when she slapped power at the guard who fired on her. The bullet pinged off her shield and shot back into his chest. Even as he fell Duncan slashed out, sword singing. In seconds, the guards lay, finished.
Hargrove cowered back, one hand held up. “You need me to—”
“We don’t.” Fallon flamed the gun he whipped from behind his back so he screamed, fell to his knees. “But I want you to taste what you’ve served.”
She dragged him to his feet, flashed him back to containment and into a cell. “You’re deposed,” she said. “Arlys?”
“Right here. I’m getting all of it.”
“When we have control of the communications here, can you broadcast without Chuck?”
“Oh yeah. I’m writing copy in my head right now.”
Fallon continued to study Hargrove, who sat in his fine suit, his false medals glinting while he cradled his burned hand. No power in him, she thought. Only what he’d stolen, what he’d killed for, what he’d grasped.
Now his hands were empty.
“Why don’t you do your interview now. You might want to get some statements from the others. We’ll send a medic to treat the wounded.”
“It’s more than they did for prisoners,” Duncan noted.
“Yes. We’re more than they are.” She turned her back on Hargrove. “Communications?”
“I’m with you.” Duncan took her hand.
The battle of D.C. waged from dawn to dusk. More than four thousand lost their lives and more than three thousand were wounded in the bloodiest day since the Doom.
LFL forces freed more than two hundred prisoners, and their strike forces found and freed another fifty from secondary containments, and sixty more, primarily children, held in an underground section of what had been the National Gallery of Art.
Resistance forces, numbering approximately fifteen hundred, joined with the LFL to defeat the government troops and the DUs.
General Dennis Urla formally surrendered the city. He, James Hargrove, Dr. Terrance Carter, Commander Lawrence Otts, and other key figures in the city’s rule, along with two thousand enemy troops, were taken as prisoners of war.
With her father, Fallon stood in a vault, stared with some wonder at the stacks of gold bars, of silver, the wink and glint of jewels set in more gold for adornment. Cases of diamonds, cold and white.
“I wanted you to see,” she told him. “We found another, full of art, old masters. I recognized some from books. Duncan recognized more.”
“Hoarding it all. Hargrove’s personal treasure house. He—or somebody—looted the museums. Maybe at first—give them the benefit—to protect, but this? Hoarding, and for what?”
“He—and those like him—would still see this as wealth, and in wealth, power. The metal and stones can be useful, for engineering, building, mechanics, and in magicks. The art should be preserved. One day, it should be housed again, where people can see it, students can study it. It belongs to no one because it belongs to everyone.”
Simon tapped a gold bar with a battle-stained finger. “There are some who’d kill for this. It doesn’t matter you can’t plant it, eat it, keep warm with it.”
“Yeah. White kills for bigotry, for his wrathful god, but still draped Arlington in riches as he saw them. Hargrove kills for power and this. And this.” She gestured around the vault. “Because for him and those like him, those bars of metal can make one man a king, and the lack of them makes others slaves. That time is over.”
__________
Arlys recorded all of it, with footage of the battle, of the condition of government prisoners and their rescue in her broadcast from the White House. She ended with a shot of the white standard flying through the battle smoke over the ruined city.
With Fallon, she sat with Hargrove in his cell. With her camera on a tripod, she took notes.
Though pale, he’d recovered some of his arrogance. “You’ve committed treason against the United States of America. You will hang for it. Our military and our allies will, I promise you, cut through you and wipe you off the face of this earth.”
“Allies like Jeremiah White and his cult? Allies that stand by while you sign orders to torture, maim, kill? Orders directing children be locked away in the dark and half starved? You kept infants locked away, infants born after you forcibly impregnated women. Six infants in this, once the people’s house. And embryos, fetuses, found in jars in your laboratories here.
“How many more people, children, infants, unborn are locked away by your orders?”
“You’re not people. You’re not human.”
“I bleed, I breathe, I think, I feel. I know right from wrong, light from dark. How many more, and where are their locations?”
“I am the president of the United States! I am the commander in chief.”
“Self-appointed following a military coup on what was left of the government and this city,” Arlys said briskly as she took her notes. “They weren’t much better than you.”
“No,” Fallon agreed, “not much better. If we were like them, like you, like the Dark Uncanny you’ve both used and f
ought against, I would cut you down with a thought.”
He paled at that, drew back. “White’s right about you. You’re from hell.”
“No, but you? I see the dark in you, the human dark, the dark with no power but force and cruelty. Your time’s done.” She rose. “You don’t have to tell me where you hold prisoners. There are other ways to find them.”
“Torture. Black magicks.”
He believed that, she realized. Believed every word of his own lies. “You’re alive. Your hand’s been given medical attention. You’ll be humanely treated. But you’ll never know freedom again. I don’t want your death. It’s enough to know that you’ll be here, under this dead city, for the rest of your life.”
“I have a couple more questions. Mr. Hargrove,” Arlys began.
“I am the president commander!”
“There is some dispute over that, but as president you’d swear to uphold the Constitution. Isn’t it a violation of the Constitution, of basic human rights, of all decency, to forcibly impregnate females detained and contained for experimental purposes?”
“They’re not human! Freaks! Abominations!”
“You consider the half-starved children I recorded being released from what’s essentially a dungeon abominations?” Arlys crossed her legs, settled in. “Let’s talk about abominations.”
Fallon left him to Arlys—skilled hands, she knew. She left the others who’d followed him, taken his orders, ignored their humanity in the glass cages and walked back into the lab area.
Mallick waited for her.
Her heart lifted. “I’m so glad to see you. Glad to see you unharmed.”
“You have the city. Even the crows have deserted it. It was once a seat of power. Will it be yours?”