The Complete Ridley Kayne Chronicles

Chapter 2

2

The man following Ridley wore a vintage fedora hat, and his hands were pushed deep into the pockets of his dark maroon coat. He must have seen the envelope Ezra handed to her, must have seen the cash she took a few seconds to count before slipping the envelope inside her jacket. He would also have seen her stopping at the two apartment blocks, but what he wouldn’t have seen were the two new envelopes she’d left on two different kitchen tables, each filled with half the money Ezra had given her. Ridley had nothing left on her now, but the man in the maroon coat didn’t know that.

She mentally kicked herself as she tried not to change her pace. She and Ezra, the dealer she sold her stolen items to, were always so careful about the meeting spots they chose. How had someone seen them? But perhaps, Ridley wondered as she turned yet another corner and increased her pace ever so slightly, this wasn’t a coincidence. She wasn’t the type to get paranoid, but this job hadn’t exactly been of the regular variety. Ezra rarely received specific requests from clients. Ridley stole things—jewelry, art, pre-Cataclysm collectibles—Ezra presented them to whoever might be interested, and hopefully the items would sell. It wasn’t every day that one of those clients came back to him and said, Get me this item from Alastair Davenport’s private collection of ancient relics. Which meant someone knew before she even broke into the Davenports’ apartment that it would happen. And if that someone hadn’t been careful with his information …

“Dammit,” she muttered as specks of rain landed on her head and shoulders. A glance at the store window to her right told her the man was gaining on her. Perhaps he knew she’d noticed him and decided there was little point in keeping his distance now. Or maybe he didn’t know, but either way, it was time she stopped pretending she was oblivious.

She sped up, heading straight for the subway entrance up ahead. If she wasn’t so tired already, she would have disappeared another way, but she knew if she tried that particular method right now, she’d end up with the kind of migraine that felt like a screwdriver piercing her eyeballs. Besides, at this time of day it would be easy to lose the man among the crowds down in the subway.

She reached the subway entrance and the scanner that arched over it. Her pulse quickened, as it did every time she approached a scanner, but it beeped happily as she passed beneath it, the round bulb above her head flashing green for a second as it detected her AI2. She hurried down the steps, dodging between people and raising her fingers out of habit to brush the two small scars on her neck just behind her left ear.

The first scar came from her first amulet, embedded beneath her skin at birth. The old-fashioned term ‘amulet’ always conjured up images of crudely molded arxium charms hanging from necklaces and bracelets, the way people wore their protection centuries ago before someone decided to place a charm beneath the skin instead. These days, the amulet was a flat piece of silvery arxium metal the size of Ridley’s pinkie nail. Its anti-magic properties—the same properties that made arxium a necessary component of the wasteland trains and the wall surrounding Lumina City—prevented anyone from using harmful magic against her.

She got her second scar at roughly the same time everyone else did: after the Cataclysm when the use of magic was banned worldwide. Just in case anyone planned to ignore that law—anyone stupid enough to risk pulling on the wild elemental magic that now covered most of the earth—an additional law was put in place dictating that everyone receive a second amulet, the Arxium Implant 2. With this second amulet beneath the skin, it was impossible to pull magic from the environment and use it.

Ridley reached the bottom of the steps and pushed forward through the throng of people. Muffled music thumped from a nearby pair of headphones while somewhere overhead, an intercom beeped and a voice announced a delay in one of the subway lines. Instead of moving with the crowd toward the turnstile, Ridley weaved her way to the restroom. Seconds later, she was inside, holding the door slightly ajar and watching through the sliver of space for the man in the maroon coat. She spotted him as he reached the final step and began struggling to push his way through the crowd toward the turnstile.

“Ohmygosh, and they caught her, like, right in front of my apartment building!”

Ridley glanced over her shoulder as she became aware that she wasn’t alone in the restroom. Two girls leaned against the wall beside the hand dryer, peering at something on a commscreen. A video, she realized as a tinny female voice reached her ears: “… finally tracked her down and arrested her earlier this afternoon.” Ridley returned her gaze to the man who was heading straight for the turnstile and about to give her a chance to sneak back up to the street.

“What an i***t,” one girl said. “She had to know she’d end up dead.”

“I know, right? One-way ticket to the death penalty.”

“Well, yeah, either that or from magic blowing up in her face. Like that chick on top of the Haddison Building earlier this year.”

At the word ‘magic,’ Ridley’s attention snapped back to the two girls.

“Serena Adams?” the second girl replied.

“Yeah, her. Why don’t people learn when they see things like that? No, they have to go and experiment and put everyone else’s lives in danger.”

“Shh,” the other girl said, and pointed at the commscreen.

“All we can confirm at this point,” the voice from the video continued, “is that her AI2 was removed sometime within the last few days, allowing her to pull magic from the environment, a crime that has been punishable by death for close to a decade now. The woman, whose name we have yet to confirm, is an employee of Capita Farms on the edge of the city. It was the farm’s proximity to the arxium wall that alerted several of the woman’s colleagues to the fact that elemental magic was being used: The magic rebounded upon making contact with the wall’s arxium plating, first causing minor damage to a solar panel, then followed minutes later by a small explosion that destroyed a section of a wheat field.”

As the newscaster continued speaking, Ridley touched the scars behind her ear yet again, hesitating as her eyes followed the man in the maroon coat. But as much as she wanted to know more about this woman who’d just got herself arrested, Ridley had more important things to worry about right now. She pulled the door open enough to stick her head out and watched the man finally push through the turnstile and rush forward without looking back. She ducked out of the restroom and walked the other way, back to the stairs and up to the street.

Raindrops—a little larger than before—pattered down around her. Ridley tugged her jacket off, turned it inside out to reveal the light blue lining, and pulled it back on. After covering her head with the hood once more, she shoved her hands into her pockets and walked as quickly as she could without running. In the back of her mind, she mapped out the quickest way home—a two-block walk, a bus ride, and another quick walk—but she kept most of her attention directed behind her. With every corner she turned, her eyes darted back over her shoulder. Still no maroon coat or fedora hat in sight.

The bus she caught carried her fifteen minutes away from the city center. She survived the annoying kid kicking the back of her seat while singing rude variations on the old ‘roses are red, magic is blue’ poem and got hastily to her feet as soon as the bus neared the first Demmer District stop. She climbed off, jumped over a puddle, and skirted the soggy trash blocking the drain. Demmer wasn’t exactly the slum of the city—the bus would have had to continue for another five minutes or so to reach that part of town—but it certainly wasn’t an area anyone from the glitzy skyscraper district would frequent.

Ridley crossed the street as the bus grumbled and groaned and pulled away from the stop. She turned a corner—and that was when the bolt of magic flashed downward. It struck a pole half a block ahead of her, rebounded off the bent pole in multiple zigzagging flashes, and hit the road, cracking the tar and sending a small shock wave through the ground. Ridley stumbled back against a laundromat window, her heart jumping into high speed as the last spark of magic cracked a garbage bin in half and vanished. Her first thought was that it must have come from the storm brewing overhead. The many arxium panels—flat bus-sized pieces of arxium metal hovering a little higher than the city’s tallest building—were supposed to reflect atmospheric magic away from the earth. But the large spaces that existed between the panels made it easy for stray magic to find its way through during particularly volatile storms. It was startling to witness firsthand, but it wasn’t unheard of.

Then Ridley’s gaze moved beyond the fissure in the road. She saw flashing blue and red lights and a car screeching to a stop. A woman raced in front of the car, then leaped over the cracked road. Something blue and wispy rose away from her hands and arms, streaming behind her as she ran. Shouts and gunshots echoed between the buildings, and Ridley realized suddenly that the magic wasn’t from the storm above. The magic was pulled from right here in the city. Pulled by the woman fleeing past her. Ridley flattened herself against the laundromat window, her thoughts tumbling wildly over one another. Was this the same woman the police had arrested earlier? Had she somehow escaped? Would the magic she’d pulled end up destroying the entire street and everyone in it?

Before running around the corner and out of view, the woman grabbed hold of a lamppost and swung around to face the cops racing toward her. Her hands came together, then appeared to claw at something invisible in the air. Just beyond her fingertips, magic appeared in glowing blue wisps. With precise, hurried movements—movements Ridley hadn’t seen anyone use in years—the woman scooped at the magic. Her palms touched, her hands twisted, then her arms moved apart in a sweeping motion as her fingers traced patterns too fast for Ridley to follow. The wisps coalesced, formed a bubble, then exploded outward in a brilliant blue flash.

Ridley ducked down, squeezing her eyes shut and throwing her arms up to shield her face. The light vanished almost instantly. She blinked and tried to peer closer, both afraid and curious. Surely the woman had intended to create more than just a flash? Her hands or fingers must have made the wrong movement, produced the wrong conjuration. Ridley watched as the woman pulled desperately at the air a second time.

Crack.

Ridley flinched as the woman jerked backward. She seemed to sway a moment, then half-fell, half-slumped to the road. Her head hit the tar and the faint blue wisps drifted away just as three uniformed men gripping guns reached her motionless body.

Ridley didn’t wait to see what happened next. As the rain began to fall harder, she pushed away from the window and ran.