City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  A pause in the gunfire. A woman’s voice shouts, “Nashal! Do it now! Fucking do it now!”

  He’s got to do something, got to stop it somehow. He sits up, but then the gunfire resumes, sawing through the wall just above him, and he drops again.

  She’s got him pinned down. There’s nothing he can do.

  Crouched in the greasy, reeking, clanging guts of the tram car, Ivanya Restroyka stares down the cables in terror.

  There’s not much she can hear over the sounds of the tram car’s engine, but she can hear that: it’s gunfire. And lots of it.

  She stares down the cable, scatter-gun in her hands, its stock pressed to her shoulder. She raises it, not sure what she’s going to aim at or, gods forbid, what she’s going to shoot at.

  Am I about to shoot a gun? Am I really? At a bomb? It’s all too preposterous to believe.

  Then she sees it, crawling down the cable at them at a very fast rate: the second tram car. It’s far too close to be safe.

  Something’s wrong.

  She points her scatter-gun at the advancing car, feeling ridiculous and impotent.

  It’s quite close now. Close enough for her to see that the front window is open, just above the tram car’s nose.

  There’s a man in the window, a Saypuri man with a beard and a gray cap. He’s pointing something at her. It looks like a big piece of plumbing, made of green metal and with a big, gaping mouth. The man hunches low, pressing his cheek to its side, and shuts one eye.

  He’s aiming it at her. He’s about to…

  Something dark flies from the thing’s mouth.

  Ivanya’s instincts take over. She squeezes the trigger, and…

  The world lights up.

  The explosion is loud enough that at first Sigrud thinks the tram car’s been knocked off its cables. It’s a bone-rattling, punctuated blast, not the dull roar of an incendiary mine but something high-impact. And from the smoke that’s now pouring through the bullet-riddled door to the crew’s quarters, it detonated very, very close.

  The tram car slows to a stop. He expects it to fall—but it doesn’t.

  Sigrud’s still reeling from the blast, but he manages to think: Ivanya. She shot it, didn’t she? And it went off right in their faces….

  He stands. The chatter of gunfire seems to have ceased. The stream of smoke from the crew’s quarters is thickening.

  It’s a miracle we weren’t blown off the cables, he thinks.

  He bursts through the pulverized door, which comes apart easily under his bulk. He crouches low, struggling to see through the smoke. The cockpit door is speckled with holes, some big, some small. Shrapnel—which means whoever’s in the cockpit is probably in no laughing mood. He narrows his eye and spies a woman lying in the corner, a massive, fully automatic rifling beside her. A bun of black hair has unraveled on top of her head. The gold-eyed woman I saw in the mirror, he thinks.

  She’s not the priority right now, he knows. He needs to make sure whoever has that mine-throwing device isn’t going to use it again.

  He walks through the smoke, kicks open the cockpit door, and is slapped in the face by the cool winter air. The front windows and the nose of the tram car are a blackened mess. The top front of the outer hull has been blown in, peppering the cockpit with shrapnel. Lying beside the door is a Saypuri man, still clutching the battered mine-throwing weapon. Something has shaved off a lot of his scalp, or perhaps it’s been blown off—regardless, his face is a mottled mass of blood. Sigrud thinks he’s dead, but then he shifts and moans. Blood bubbles out of his ragged lips.

  Sigrud looks forward, through the blown-in windows. The bomb must have gone off about twenty feet in front of the nose of the car: the cables there are blackened and somewhat shredded, like unraveling yarn.

  That’s not good, he thinks.

  He can see the next tram car fifty or sixty feet ahead. It appears to have stopped as well. He supposes he can’t blame them: they don’t have any visibility on what’s going on yet, and they’re likely doing systems checks to make sure their craft is still functional after the detonation.

  But huddled in the hatch at the bottom is a pale figure: Ivanya. She’s wide-eyed, shivering, but she appears uninjured, clutching the scatter-gun like it’s a prized toy. Its muzzle is smoking, very slightly.

  Sigrud sighs and waves to her, relieved. She waves back with one trembling hand.

  Then she sits up, mouth open, and points. Not at him, he realizes. But something behind him.

  Then the knife sinks into his back.

  Sigrud roars and brings his left elbow down, catching his assailant in the side—the Saypuri woman. She coughs and falls backward into the smoky cabin. He looks back at his shoulder, and sees a combat knife buried two inches into it. He reaches up and rips it out.

  It should have gone in farther—hells, she could have cut his throat. She’s had training, after all. It takes him a minute to realize why: as she struggles to stand, he sees she’s bleeding freely from a wound in her belly. Shrapnel, he thinks. She’s probably drunk with shock.

  “You piece of shit,” she mutters. “You…you piece of shit…”

  He pulls out his pistol, intending to put her down. But she flies up with surprising strength and speed, and slaps the gun out of his hand. She delivers one quick strike to his neck, which nearly makes him black out, but he manages to block the next blow with his right arm before she can finish the job.

  Sigrud grasps her wrist and swings his skull forward, soundly head-butting her on the cheek. She moans and stumbles back, but he’s already advancing, brandishing her own knife at her. Growling, she assumes a defensive stance.

  “You were going to kill Tatyana,” says Sigrud. “You were the people who killed Shara.”

  The woman spits blood on the ground. “May that fucking bitch rot,” she says. “May her and you and all you’ve done rot and fester.”

  Sigrud nods, as if this is the answer he wanted. “I’m going to kill you now.”

  She spits more blood. “And I’m going to make you work for it.”

  They close in on each other.

  She fights well, using his size and the small confines against him, trying to deliver quick, sharp blows to his joints, to his neck, to his face. But this is not her fight to win. She’s in much worse shape than he is. And he has a hundred pounds on her, and a knife.

  She dodges the knife as best she can, backing down through the crew’s quarters, back through the pulverized door. She catches the blade on her underarm, then along her side. He opens up her ribs, and blood spatters onto the floor. She’s good—she doesn’t even cry out with the pain—but not good enough.

  She finally stumbles. He steps into her stance, bumps his shoulder into hers, and buries the knife up under her ribs.

  The slightest whimper. She tries to crush his nose with the heel of her palm, but he turns his face away and takes the blow on the side of his skull.

  He pushes the knife in farther. Still she fights against him, trying to punch his throat.

  He grabs her back with his free hand, pulls her forward, and shoves the blade in even deeper.

  That should do it. She should stop fighting.

  But then, to his surprise, she draws a deep breath and yells in a ragged voice, “Now, Nashal! Do it now, do it now!”

  He drops her and turns. The bloodied, ravaged man in the cockpit has staggered to his feet. He’s brought the mine-thrower up to his shoulder and is drunkenly pointing it through the broken windows.

  Time feels like it slows down. He can’t see Ivanya, but he knows she’s there, still holding the scatter-gun. If she shoots another mine out of the air, it’ll blow the cables apart and send both tram cars down.

  Sigrud pulls the second pistol out of the holster on his thigh, and brings it up. But then, to his disbelief, the Saypuri woman’s on him again, leaping onto his back and clawing at his face, trying to throw his aim off.

  He struggles to hold the pistol up. The bloody Saypuri man is
still trying to aim the mine-thrower out the window. The woman is punching Sigrud’s face, digging her fingers into his cheek, and then into his eye…

  Splut.

  She rips out his false eye. This surprises her so much that she freezes just for one moment, holding the warm, white sphere. “What?” she says, bewildered.

  Sigrud aims and fires.

  The shot is true: the side of the Saypuri man’s skull bursts open and he collapses, his weapon falling to the floor beside him.

  With a shove, Sigrud tosses the Saypuri woman off. She falls to the floor, gasping.

  He turns around, his chest heaving. He bends down, takes his false eye out of her hand, and stows it away in his pocket. As he stands, her other hand flies up to her mouth.

  She slips something between her lips, a small, black sphere. Then she swallows it.

  “Poison?” asks Sigrud. “Why, if you’re already dying?”

  She laughs bitterly. “I thought you knew everything about the Divine,” she says. “They’re all about resurrection.”

  Sigrud chooses to ignore this. “Why do you work for him? Why risk your life and kill innocents for him?”

  “The game’s rigged,” she gasps. “Every system’s broken. Saypuri, Continental, Divine. There are no innocents. He’s going to burn it all down. Burn it all down and start over again.”

  “And you? Will you burn as well?”

  “No.” She shuts her eyes. “When he starts over, I’ll be right there with him.”

  She opens her eyes. They’re no longer the amber-gold color he’s familiar with: they’re jet-black, like they’re made of oil.

  Sigrud says, “What in the…?”

  The woman lifts her left hand and plunges it into the wound in her side. Her face registers no pain: it’s as if she’s in a daze. Impossibly, she shoves her hand in deeper and deeper, the ribs crackling and crunching, until her wrist enters the wound, and then part of her forearm…and then she begins to pull something out.

  It is long, and black, and gleaming. She pulls out a foot of it, then two feet, then she’s using both hands to pull it out, more and more and more. Sigrud points the pistol and shoots her in the face, emptying the pistol into her skull. The bullets punch through her cheek and brow, but it makes no difference: her hands keep pulling, and pulling, and pulling…

  And then it’s out.

  It’s a spear. A huge, long, black spear, taller than he is, glimmering like oil. Though it makes no sense, he understands that the woman has just pulled this dark spear from her heart.

  Still lying prone on the floor, her blank, black eyes staring up at the ceiling, the woman slams the butt of the spear down on the floor of the tram car.

  The impact of the spear is rendered in silence: it’s as if its touch kills all sound around it—and then after it, all light. The light from the windows, the fluttering lights in the ceiling—they all die the instant the spear makes contact, and all is dark.

  Sigrud stands in the black. He pats his belt, pulls out more bullets, and begins reloading his pistol, thinking only, This is bad.

  He feels vibrations in the floor: someone is climbing to their feet close to them. Someone…big.

  Slowly, slowly, the lights return, the gray-white light of a snow flurry, and with it the rumble of the tram car. Then he sees the woman is not lying on the floor anymore.

  There is something in the cabin of the tram car with him. Something very tall, something heaving with exertion, holding the spear.

  It seems human-shaped, but it’s difficult to confirm this: it looks like it’s made of smoke and oil and sludge—a tall, thin creature whose long limbs speak of wiry strength. Its face, however, is blank, perfectly blank, like the face of a statue made of jet whose features have been completely sanded over.

  The thing takes a breath—or it seems to, for can such things breathe?—and screams.

  Its scream is silence: when it cries out all sounds die with it, as if Sigrud has entered a perfect vacuum incapable of transmitting sound.

  Yet there are still words in that silence, an idea communicated in wordlessness:

 

  Sigrud raises the pistol and starts shooting.

  Shooting the thing, it seems, mostly succeeds in just pissing it off. He can hear the gunshots, though, which suggests sound still works—somewhat. The creature staggers back a little, but then lunges forward, its dark spear flying forward.

  Sigrud ducks just in time. The shaft tears through the air just above him and sinks deep into the wall, slashing through it as if it were water.

  Curiously, though, the impact makes no sound. If he hadn’t seen it happen, he wouldn’t have known it’d happened at all.

  He reaches up with his right hand, attempting to grab the spear and wrench it out of the creature’s grasp, but the merest touch of the shaft is like touching a glacier: his palm screams with icy pain, and he snaps it away, hissing.

  He rolls away and scrambles back into the crew’s quarters. He looks at his right hand and sees the flesh of his palm is bright red, like he dipped it in open flames. Not good, he thinks. The woman’s fully automatic rifling is still lying on the ground. He snatches it up, checks to confirm it’s loaded, and looks up just in time to see the creature dart into the quarters, the spear lashing out again like a black tongue.

  Sigrud dives to the right, and once more the spear barely misses him. He can’t hear its strike again—it’s like its blows happen with no sound at all—but he watches as the spear slashes through the control panels of the tram car. Then the creature pulls the spear back, slaps its hands together…

  And all sound dies. Seemingly permanently, this time.

  Sigrud raises the rifling and opens up on the creature in a quick burst. The muzzle flare is bright, but the gun’s chatter makes no sound. The creature flinches as the bullets spatter its face, its torso, and Sigrud uses its distraction to dive out the door, past it, and down the aisle, sprinting away with soundless steps.

  His sense of gravity shifts, and he realizes the tram car is now moving forward again, fast. The creature must have hit a lever or button when it stabbed its spear into the control panel—or perhaps it has mind enough to try to get close to Ivanya’s car, close enough to jump aboard and slaughter everyone in it.

  He whirls around to see the creature is much, much closer than he realizes, and he falls back just as the spear blade darts out again, slashing open the chairs behind him.

  He points the rifling up at the creature and fires, spraying it down with bullets. It recoils, tiny flickers appearing in its oily skin. Still the world is silent and soundless. The recoil, his own growls, the burst of the bullets—they’re all totally silent, not even making a whisper. The effect is profoundly disorienting to him.

  Sigrud stands and sprints farther down the aisle, then rolls behind a row of chairs to hide. This, he realizes, was a bad choice: he never realized how much he was so dependent on sound to navigate combat, but now that it’s like he’s deaf, he can’t hear if the creature’s near or not.

  He crouches and places his palm flat on the floor. He can feel vibrations, very slightly. The creak of the tram car as the wind and snow strikes its hull. The engine thrumming as the car blindly charges forward. And then, from somewhere near, rapid impacts…

  Sigrud falls to the floor just as the black shaft shoots through the chair above him, punching through the wall of the tram. The spear retreats and white light pours through—it must have stabbed clean through the hull.

  He rolls out into the aisle, only to find the creature stepping forward to straddle him. It raises its spear high, intending to run him through. This time there’s nowhere for him to move to, no escape.

  Then the tram car jumps and the creature stumbles back. Sigrud rolls over, rises, and springs back down the tram car—realizing that his car has just collided with Ivanya and Taty’s.

  I do hope, he thinks as he flees, that I
vanya has not been crushed….

  He has to think of a plan. There must be something to fight it with. Maybe not damage it, since bullets certainly don’t seem to work, but if he can throw it out of the car somehow…

  He cocks his head. It is, after all, very hard to stand up on the top of the car, since it’s so icy. He’s experienced this personally, of course.

  He runs down the tram car, past the corpses of the three Saypuri men, back up the stairs, back to the waiting area where he came in….

  Then the wall beside him seems to erupt. First comes the spear, shooting through the metal wall, and then the creature wriggles through the perforation, parting the metal effortlessly and shouldering through like some sort of bizarre birth.

  Sigrud staggers back as he avoids the spear, falling to the floor. The creature whips around, the spear lashes out…

  He has no time to lift the rifling in his right hand, no time to move. The creature will hurl the spear around and plunge it into his breast.

  His instincts take over. With his left hand, Sigrud reaches up and snatches the shaft of the spear, just behind the blade, right as the creature swings it to point at his chest.

  It should burn him, he knows. It should be like touching metal that’s been submerged in the frozen depths of the ocean. It should rip his skin away, sloughing off the flesh of his hand like it’s made of wet tissue paper.

  But it doesn’t. It doesn’t hurt at all. His left hand holds the spear tight, and hard—and painlessly.

  He feels a flicker of confusion from the black creature.

  The point of the blade hovers just above his heart.

  The creature quivers with rage, and tries its hardest to push through his grasp.

  Sigrud clenches his jaw, turning his left shoulder into his hold on the spear, pushing it away from his heart. The point inches closer, and closer….

  The tip pierces his sweater, nicks the flesh behind it on his right breast, close to the shoulder. The wound is like being shot through with ice.