Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker 3)

Inside the lab, dozens of people were very calmly, very carefully packing vials of antidote into whatever bags or satchels they happened to have handy, and leaving the lab with haste—but not too much haste. Most of the faces Toshi recognized as contacts of his, although he knew none of their names.

“For the restricted zone,” Ivan said, gesturing to the people leaving with bags.

“And the pesticide?” Toshi asked.

“Over there,” he replied, pointing to a line of vats against the opposite wall. “We’ve managed to retrofit a few crossbows to distribute it.” Ivan picked up a crossbow and demonstrated. “Shoot a dart into a swarm of Workers, the dart explodes and sends out a mist of pesticide. Trouble is, there are only so many crossbows to go around—just what a few rebels here and there have managed to steal over the years.”

“How do we get more?”

“All the Hive’s watchtowers are stocked with crossbows.”

Toshi thought of the platforms soaring high above the city streets. “But who can get to them except the Hive?” he asked. Ivan shrugged as if say he could only do so much. “Does the pesticide work at least?”

“Who knows? We can’t test it without alerting the Hive,” Ivan said with a fatalistic laugh. “Come. I need help.”

Toshi rolled up his sleeves. “Grace could wake at any moment. I’m on borrowed time,” he said.

“We all are,” Ivan replied.

Toshi was just about to put on a pair of gloves, when he heard a low hum in the air and felt all three of the Workers clinging to him suddenly lift off his skin. He looked around and noticed that all the Workers in the room were leaving. He and Ivan ran out of the room, hearing startled gasps, and pushed their way past the confused masses and out onto the street.

The sky had gone dark. Toshi looked up. Every inch of airspace was covered with Warrior Sisters. They were all flying toward the perimeter wall simultaneously. Ivan ran back inside, Toshi close on his heels, both of them taking the stairs inside the villa two at a time until they reached the top floor. Ivan pushed open a door to a room that was empty except for a single staircase that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. They emerged on the roof of the villa and looked out past the wall.

An army stood on the field of flowers, ready for battle.

CHAPTER

15

Lily felt Juliet calling to her after she finished claiming another queen.

Lily, Lillian has taken her army to Bower City without us. They just disappeared.

Rowan’s brow furrowed in question at Lily’s expression. “Lillian didn’t wait for us,” she told him.

I told you I was gathering more forces, Lily called out to Lillian in mindspeak.

I gave you all the time I could, Lillian replied. Join me now or the war is lost.

Lily turned to Rowan. “What do I do?” she asked him.

Over the course of the day they’d managed to claim almost twenty nests, but it was only a tiny fraction of what they needed. Rowan pulled his lower lip through his teeth, his eyes scrambling across the ground as he thought. Finally, he shook his head.

“We don’t have a choice. Dividing our forces would be suicide,” he said. “We have to go.”

“But we don’t have enough soldiers,” Lily said, holding her hands out helplessly.

Rowan was calm. He looked at the Woven Lily had just claimed and smiled to himself. “Then I guess it will come down to which side has the strongest queen,” he said. He took her hand and kissed the backs of her fingers and warmth traced up her arm. “It’s time, Lily.”

Lily nodded. She was exhausted. She had never felt more awake.

Rowan struck flint against steel and sent a spark into the mulch at Lily’s feet. As the fire rose she closed her eyes to gather up all of her claimed.

She started with the insect Woven. Seeing through the pale lavender tinge of the speaking stone near Richmond, she summed all fifty thousand of them. Using the same speaking stone, she moved to her raptors, only one thousand pairs of wings, but they would be invaluable to fight the flying Hive.

Her mind dove into the fast-flowing stream of the speaking stones, heading north. She saw green and stopped to gather the nine thousand of the tank-like Pride and the thirty thousand of her human claimed waiting at the camp. Carrying all of them with her, Lily vaulted across mountains and valleys, her mind swimming across the miles of the continent to where Pale One and the twenty thousand warriors of the Pack were waiting in the flaxen-yellow hue of the Ocean of Grass.

Lily turned her mind, now nearly a hundred thousand strong, through the scorched red of Death Valley, up over the thin pink and rarefied air of the rocky mountains, and into the misty pearlescent throbbing of the westernmost speaking stone. Toshi was standing right next to it. He called out to her.