officers inside it shifting, and then one thrust a hand against the glass, showing the unmistakable palm plate of a standard-issue siphon. Mox whistled again. The car righted itself and touched down on the street like it had never moved at all.
A chorus of dissonant sounds surrounded Sloane. She clapped her hands over her ears. The car’s tires spun backward, sending it over the rails, through the barrier, and into the Chicago River.
Sloane stared at Mox. He began walking again, and the others followed him.
They traveled in silence over the water, then turned to walk along it. They passed gutters full of paper and half-crushed soda cans. Sloane kicked a rotting apple core out of her way. She was numb with terror and just as afraid of the Army of Flickering finding them as she was of the man who had just drowned two police officers.
Ahead of them, Sloane spotted dark figures. A shout rang out. There was a flash of fire, and in the orange light, Sloane saw the seal of the Army of Flickering on one man’s jacket.
“Ziva!” Mox shouted, so loud the sound crackled in his mask. He ran.
The wall of fire cast by the Army of Flickering danced toward hunched shapes that Sloane recognized as Ziva, the lieutenant, and four other undead soldiers. Ziva and one of the other soldiers whistled, together, and ice formed at their feet, piling on itself until it had formed a knee-high barrier of icicles that reflected fractured moonlight.
Mox reached them, and he swept the soldiers off their feet with a low rumble. They landed hard on their knees on the street. Mox shouted instructions at Ziva that Sloane couldn’t hear.
An arc of energy, almost like a bubble of air, swept toward him. It pushed him back, toward the river, and up, at least six feet in the air. Mox fell hard on his back, but as soon as he hit the ground, he thrust his arm up and let out a peal of percussive sound.
Chunks of pavement pulled away from the edges of the road and hurtled toward the soldiers. They threw up shimmering barriers of energy, and the rocks pummeled them but didn’t break through.
Mox turned to Ziva and shouted, “Go!”
Ziva hesitated, and Mox whistled, sending a hiss of air toward her so intense, it blew the hood off her head. She ran, followed by the four undead soldiers under her command. Mox turned his attention back to the soldiers of the Army of Flickering, who had let down their barriers in the wake of the rock assault and were, together, raising water from the river. At the gesture of the lead woman, the water formed a massive orb the size of a car. It had no sooner taken shape than it enveloped Mox completely.
The orb warped and rotated almost as soon as it hit him, and then he was in the center of a cyclone, his hair clinging to his masked face and his soaked clothes whipping around his shoulders. The cyclone chewed up pavement as it charged at the soldiers, flinging rocks and water in equal measure at them.
As one of the soldiers cringed away from the onslaught, Sloane recognized her as Edda. Their eyes met just as Mox raised his hand again.
Sloane shouted, “Don’t!”
Mox hesitated, and it cost him. Edda whistled, sharp and clean, and something silver shot through the air at him—a large fragment of metal that stabbed his side. His body hunched around it. He screamed through the siphon and, the next moment, let out a long, keening note. Day-bright light exploded from his hand.
Sloane threw an arm up over her eyes to shield them, but this was no momentary flash—she felt a continued heat against her forearm that meant the light was still burning. The Flickering soldiers were shouting at one another. A hand wrapped around her elbow.
“Keep your arm up,” Mox said to her. “Let’s go.”
He steered her away from the Flickering soldiers, barked a command at the undead ones trailing them, and they ran.
Cordus Daily
THE BULLETIN BOARD: MEETING PLACE OF MAGICAL YOUTH
by Sarah Romanoff
CHICAGO, NOVEMBER 3: “If I have an idea for a working I can’t do on my own,” Elissa, seventeen, says as she staples a piece of paper to the bulletin board in Palmer Square Park, “I just put up a request for an assembly. You can specify ages, too, so I always do eighteen or under. We don’t want any strange old men spoiling the fun.”