Burning Bright

“Yes,” Harmsway said, “I can admit it. You’re too strong for me, you and your crazy clone-sibs, and I like it too much.”

“Would you rather be dead?” Avellar asked.

“Desir, don’t,” Hazard said.

Harmsway ignored him. “No, damn you. All right. I’ll do it.”

Avellar held out his hands, carefully not smiling, and Harmsway took them with only the slightest hesitation. There was a little silence, and then a kind of darkness seemed to gather around them. Shapes moved in the darkness, shapes that were Avellar, shapes that wore Avellar’s face and a woman’s body. Avellar closed his eyes, felt his power returning with Harmsway’s presence, Harmsway’s raw electrokinesis bridging the holes left by the deaths of half the clone. He could sense the others’ presence, too: Quarta in her cell, gibbering in darkness; Secunda caught in midstride, dragged away from herself by his insistent demands; Tertius ever silent, great eyes staring at nothing. He pulled them to him, made their power his own, built a ladder with it that carried him out of the prison of his body and let him look down on the warehouse as if from a great height. He saw the world in black and white, the figures of his party and of the Baron’s men clustered at the doorway pale as ghosts against the dark walls and shadows that were the piled crates. The Baron’s group had stopped, huddling together around a grounded airsled. The hunter smells something he doesn’t recognize, Avellar thought, and laughed silently. No, you wouldn’t recognize me. He spun again, looking down from his illusory height for a solution, saw Harmsway on his knees, head bowed with strain, still clinging to his hands. Harmsway was weaker than he’d realized; Avellar allowed himself to look farther afield, saw Jack Blue now standing at Lyall’s side.

Blue, he said, and felt the word fall for what seemed an eternity before it struck air and was heard. “Give me your hand.”

He forced his body to free one hand from Harmsway’s grip, held it out to Blue. The telekinetic took it, reluctantly, and Avellar felt the other’s power join his own. He let himself rise back up the ladder, dragging Blue’s talent with him, hung for a moment beneath the rafters, looking at the piles of crates through the lens of Blue’s talent. Then, almost lazily, he reached out—his hand, Blue’s telekinesis, moving as one, Harmsway still bridging the gaps that let him draw on his clone-sibs, his other selves—and tipped the first row of crates onto the Baron’s men. He heard screams—close at hand, and more distant, the noise reaching his physical body half a heartbeat later—but he closed his mind, searching for the right point. Blue’s power was fading, stuttering like an underfueled engine, but he ignored it, and toppled a second set of shelves, blocking any advance. Then he let himself slide back down the ladder, feeling it dissolve behind him as he fell, until he was back in his own body, on his knees, Jack Blue’s hand cold in his own. Harmsway was crumpled on the warped tiles, breathing in harsh gasps, his forehead against the floor. Blue lay open eyed, unmoving, his face red and mottled. Lyall crouched beside him, hand on his wrist, and shook her head as Avellar looked at her.

“He’s dead.”

Belfortune laughed softly. “So that’s how the great Avellar’s power works. You’re no more than I am, nothing more than a vampire. At least I don’t use the power I take.”

“You just dine on it,” Hazard said.

Faro said, “This is why I won’t support you, Avellar. No one who can do that should be emperor.”

“But that’s just it,” Avellar said. He reached down almost absently, lifted Harmsway so that the electrokinetic’s head rested on his lap. “This power is exactly why I should be emperor. I’m psi, yes, but it’s unlimited in type, because I can draw on all of it. But only if you let me. I can’t coerce, I can only take what’s given. Jack gave me what he had, he let me use him up, to save the rest of us. He couldn’t‘ve done it alone, and I knew how to use what he gave me. If a psi is going to be emperor—and you know that’s inevitable, there’s no one left who isn’t psi—then it should be me, because I can’t do anything alone, and without consent.”

Hazard nodded slowly, came to crouch at Harmsway’s side, he touched the electrokinetic’s face gently, and looked relieved when Harmsway stirred. Hazard supported him, helped him sit upright. Harmsway’s face was drawn, lines of fatigue sharply etched.

Faro said, “The ship’s waiting.”

Avellar nodded, pushed himself to his feet, fighting back his own exhaustion. “Let’s go.”

Two guards were standing by the cargo door, one with rifle leveled, staring toward the far door where the crates had fallen, the other babbling into a hand-held com-unit. He didn’t seem to be getting any satisfactory answers, but Avellar shrank back into the shelter of the nearest stack of crates. “Faro,” he whispered. “Can you take him?”