Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light

by Grist, Michael John

  Boom and done.

  I stagger up, spitting my own blood and black bile, as his body parts tumble to the ground and settle. I summon the black eye in tight like a second skin, scooping my own neck and innards back into place and holding them while the skin re-heals. I watch from my knees, dizzy with blood loss, as the pieces of him settle, waiting to see if they will try to crawl back together again. His head rocks slightly in a lull in the ocean's bodies, until the movement finally settles like an infant's crib swaying to a halt, and that part joins its fellows in steadily draining silence.

  That was one hell of a rib crack, better than anything he did to James While. "Come back from that, you bastard," I mutter.

  Then he does.

  It starts as a faint sound, a kind of slapping tick that gets louder I turn as around and scan the foothills, searching the weaving horizon of rising and falling body piles, all gray and silent, until I make out the figure coming down the rise.

  Shit.

  It's Olan Harrison.

  It's the same plastic handsome face. The same dark pants and shirt. Did they resurrect him already?

  Except then he's standing just yards before me, and reality feels like it skipped a beat on fast-forward. Maybe I blinked for a whole minute? He's right there before me, flashed into existence like a leper. Now it feels like my eyes are filling with water, as the ground shifts underfoot and I am moved, and he is moved, and my knuckles clack back into position and the dead pieces of him fade, and….

  We're back where we started; back in the diamond silence, back in the face-off.

  There's Olan Harrison, looking at me. Here I am.

  "I wanted to see what you were capable of," he says, by way of explanation.

  I don't trust myself to speak. I remember driving my knee through his sternum. I remember the thick rush of his blood, and the joy of his arms coming away beneath the black eye. I remember each blow I struck, and the blood flaring out, but now I see pretty clearly that those things didn't happen.

  I begin to feel the silky touch of his diamond tendrils moving within my shield. I register that with horror. They're inside the black eye. They're slinking icily over my skin. How long have they been there?

  I blink hard, in the real world and on the line, but that doesn't shift them. I look at my stomach; the slits in my clothes are gone; how could he trick me about that? I touch my belly but there isn't any lump of a scar.

  Something has shifted here and I look into his white eyes. They seem fiercer now, and I feel smaller beneath them. What the hell did he just do?

  "That was savage," Olan says. "I see why Rachel Heron warned me. If it had been her, I have no doubt she would be torn apart and buried already."

  He gestures to the place where his body parts fell. I finally find words. I'd expected him to have powers, but this? "How did you do that?"

  He frowns. "I built this mind thirteen years ago, Last Mayor. You shouldn't be surprised that I've learned how to use it."

  He clicks his fingers, and I'm forced instantly to my knees. His diamond tendrils compel me, and I can't stop them. They're inside my thoughts, snuck beneath my defenses. I try shuffling the black eye through different variations, adopting tricks I developed long ago on my trip across the Atlantic, back when I was the one forcing Feargal to his knees, humiliating him for Drake's amusement, making him misremember things that he did or didn't do.

  Olan Harrison has now done that to me. I spin the eye through different attacks but he deflects each with ease.

  "Arrogance, Last Mayor. You have raw power but you don't have discipline. Like a spoiled child." He touches my shaggy black hair and runs his fingers down my scalp. "But you'll learn."

  I already have.

  Now I know what he can do.

  In turn, it's time to show him the real me. With a thought I bunch the black eye and punch it through his diamond noose around my neck, opening just enough space for me to speak.

  "Now," I say.

  And we drop.

  13. DIAMONDS

  The ground underfoot falls away and we collapse into it. Gray fills my vision as ocean bodies tumble and kick, then I am caught and lifted in the tumbling scrum of bodies, demon hands hoisting me out of the crush. I roll up and off onto the road, looking back at the heap of my floaters that have now come to life, and even now clutch at Olan Harrison in their midst.

  His plastic mouth hangs open and stunned as he spins in their midst, lashing out with diamond-coated blows that hurl floaters arcing over the surrounding body-hills. They crawl over him like ants on a scorpion. Every blow he lands opens up space for two more to pour in, fastening around him like fast-setting cement. Demons snatch at his ankles, lepers pluck at his arms and the ocean mound either side to swamp him under.

  For a second only I stare, overwhelmed with this bizarre scene and flattened by the sudden chaos on the line. He looks like a dinosaur fighting to escape a tar pit. The hard cracking of stony bodies on stony bodies rings out like a stampede of castanets, punctuated by the whoosh and crash of his diamond lashes whipping and breaking. It's what I imagine the imprisonment of every demon went like, back when millions and billions of gray floaters circled the world to bring them down.

  I snap back to reality.

  I did this. Harrison talks about arrogance, but he's the one who stepped out of his protective wall onto ground I prepared in advance. Here I made the ocean dance, and here under cover of their thrashing bodies I made them lie down. Lepers beneath demons, demons beneath floaters, forming a perfect gray mound of flattened, rolling bodies in a shallow crease of this landscape of flattened, rolling bodies, indistinguishable from the rest.

  Olan Harrison never imagined I would do this, he didn't check carefully, and now he's paying for it.

  And paying well. He cuts chunks out of my army with every blow. His diamond whips glitter like crisscrossing ropes in a sped-up game of jump rope, invisible but yielding a terrible cost as a demon tears apart at the chest, a leper is caught in mid fritzing leap and pops out of existence in a stark yellow flash. Floater limbs separate from their bodies in gushes of whispery gray powder, like ghosts released after a lifetime of suffering.

  He is mesmerizing to behold, furious and glorious at the center of the storm. On the line his whips multiply, fed by the thousand streams pouring in at his back. They flicker between lashes and solid sabers, four of them at once, then eight, sixteen, spinning like helicopter blades.

  I've never seen anything like it. I don't know how to fight that. There's no time to waste.

  I throw myself into the fray.

  His diamond blades batter against the black eye and crunch deep through its shield like metal into thick glass. I throw my arms out and come back with twin swords forged from the black eye, and take up the dance; striking, deflecting, parrying, spinning.

  I've never fought like this before, but there's nothing real about it. I can't even tell if I'm really moving, if he's moving, but on the line we weave in and out of each other's blows with a haunting, terrifying grace, as the ocean thrash against his thighs like breakers on rocks. His sixteen blades encircle me, jolting off my head and striking divots from my shoulders, but I anchor myself in deeper things; in my floaters reaching up, in my demons fighting for me, in my lepers flashing and striking like lightning.

  "I'm impressed, Last Mayor," Olan calls out over the storm of bodies chopping apart. I shouldn't be able to hear him over the roar but on the line his voice carries.

  "You made them," I answer, barely keeping my head away from his whickering diamond whips, meeting as many blows with the black eye blades as I can. "I just picked them up."

  If it weren't for the ocean I'd be crushed already, split a dozen times by a dozen blows, and it takes my every speck of concentration to fend him off. But I do fend him off. I move so fast I can't understand what's happening; some part of my brain is on automatic pilot and fighting to survive. I bounce and crack from blow to blow, and with each blow I draw a little closer. He
grins manically, howls into the sky, and turns up the pace.

  Then there comes the sound of the ocean.

  It begins as the lapping of a distant tide, but rises until it sings on the line like a tsunami wave roaring into the coast. They're coming back for me. The bulk of the thousand are sprinting from their scouting trips around the shield dome to save me. The bone-deep thunder of their thousand footfalls gives me strength, even as it gives Olan Harrison pause. In the midst of a harmonious pirouette, taking out a demon's eye and cleaving three floaters down their spines, he turns back to his wall and gauges the distance.

  I gauge it too.

  On a dime he breaks off his assault and runs. A demon rises in his path and his diamond blade punches a neat hole through its forehead. Two lepers spark into his path and he leaps one, lashes the legs out from under the other. I toss out lassos on the line but he rips through them like they're spider web threads. He's getting away. I can't let him get away.

  I take three bounds, leap, and have a demon catch me halfway up and fling me after Olan like a javelin. The black eye sharpens round my outstretched arms like an arrowhead, and I pull on the line with all my strength into his thicket of whirling diamond blades. My weight and all the mass of the army at my back cuts a divot into his diamond sheen like a catamaran prow through the storm-tossed waters of the wall.

  I scream. He roars. I drive my searing arrow point through the tips of his defenses and home, into the side of his throat.

  Then the massive fist of the wall finally swats me down, and the line abandons me. I drop and strike the hard gray ground, tumbling out my momentum over solid humps of knees and elbows without any black eye to shield me, deeper into the muddling fuzz of the wall until there's nothing of the line left and I can barely manage to lift my head.

  Olan Harrison kneels before me. There is a gouge in his throat pumping blood, and a grin on his face. In back I can feel my ocean howling at the outer edge of the wall, trying to call me back to safety. Their stamping feet carry through the foothills like a heartbeat for the world.

  Olan looks at me. His diamond blades are gone too, here in the wall. I can barely think under the jackhammer weight of the wall's static. It's like the twinges have returned, crushing me back into my parents' basement, forcing me into myself and afraid, ashamed, no longer worthy of being alive.

  But I've been through this before. Pain is just pain. So it'll be more pain tomorrow, and more pain the day after, but what does that mean to someone like me? Just a comic book artist, just a Yangtze warehouse packer, but I've got vision. He says I don't have discipline, but he's wrong. I learnt discipline fourteen years ago when the first wave went out on the Alpha array, and I learnt it so well that I flipped the signal myself, and survived every terrible second that followed.

  I force myself up to my knees. Olan Harrison's eyes go wide. He holds one hand clamped to his bloody throat. The wall comes down around me like a crashing black rain, threatening to swamp my consciousness away, but it's no thing to someone like me. I get a foot under me. There are no black eye blades here, but my hand fumbles upon a shard of rock, a broken collarbone, and I lift it up.

  "Amazing," says Olan Harrison. "Truly."

  Then there is a leper-like flash, and he is gone.

  The collarbone cracks down on the gray road where he was, splintering to bits.

  INTERLUDE 5

  Rachel Heron strode through the Redoubt, filled with purpose for the first time in over a decade. Watching the battle between Amo and Olan had tempered her decision, already forged in the presence of James While. The time for pretending was over; it was time to take this chance and do what she could.

  You only ever had one chance. She'd had too many already.

  Seeing James While had done it. The figure in the cells didn't wear his face, didn't have his lanky body, didn't contain his brain, but it was him. He was in there. His eyes said it all, said it in ways his paltry, skinless body back at the super-Array in the shitty depths of winter had never been able to say.

  Then he'd had such hope.

  She'd felt it rising off him, as she'd stepped into his frozen office after the long week of painful jumps through the line, leading her strike team. She'd almost allowed herself to believe that his hope had been for her, in anticipation of her arrival. There'd been something between them, once. They'd slept together, and it hadn't meant anything then, but in the years that followed it came to matter more, because of who he went on to become.

  While he'd circled the world in his private jet, searching for a cure, she'd joined the others in the Redoubt and mocked him. He was a fool to think the SEAL would ever capture Olan Harrison. In the long days after Olan's death, she'd counted every day as her success, because he hadn't found them.

  But he never stopped.

  When word came through from her spies in the SEAL that both Joran Helkegarde and James While had taken their 'cure', a genetic therapy that would guarantee them a decade-long death in the agonies of Lyell's syndrome, she could no longer laugh. Her team stopped laughing. What was to mock about that?

  The world ended, billions fell beneath the line, yet James While's constant search kept them confined; unable to clear their exit routes of the fallen, unable to launch the scheduled assaults on the SEAL, unable to bring the world around to their control in time for Olan to arrive.

  James While's eyes in the sky prevented that. Every day that they remained trapped in a base only ever meant to serve as a temporary retreat, a redoubt, she grew to hate him more. But in the quiet moments at night when she was alone with her own thoughts, something new was growing beneath the hatred; grudging respect. It came on like the secret growth of coral, swelling until it filled her dreams.

  Then came the Severing.

  Olan Harrison had been watching, and waiting, while secret dreams grew in all their hearts. His rule had been harsh, and his constant training regime harsher, as he forced all his people to adopt the powers he'd learned on the line. In time their dreams became whispers, then feverish plots, until in the third year of the Redoubt the violence followed.

  When they finally announced themselves, attempting to kill Olan Harrison while he slept, he announced himself in turn. Throughout one terrible day he showed every last person in the Redoubt precisely who he was and what he was capable of.

  On the line he cut the threads holding their 'souls' to their bodies, effectively killing them. Snip snip snip, those flexible little tubers said all day long, as he cut his way through them.

  He hadn't needed any surgical tools other than the diamond scalpel of his will, earned after long meditative study of the line. The rebels didn't stand a chance, and Rachel watched as they were beaten back into the missile silos, where they threatened to blow up the Redoubt if he didn't cede control.

  Olan Harrison jumped through the walls and cut their threads like so many sad helium balloons, snip snip snip.

  He saved Rachel Heron for last. She'd been loyal, had stayed away from the rebellious talk of the others, but still, she'd harbored her own secrets. A clean sweep was better, he said. She refused to beg. He cut her thread too, and she floated like the rest.

  So the Severing was complete, and Olan Harrison had complete control. The Lazarus project continued apace, with no more mutterings of dissent. When his slaves behaved well he gave them greater freedom. When they behaved poorly he crammed them into boxes so they could learn. In time they all learned.

  Even that didn't crush Rachel Heron's secret dreams. If anything they grew more intense, coming in stolen moments when Olan was distracted, as thoughts of James While surfaced unconsciously. She caught herself wishing he would find the Redoubt and rescue them. She'd never really chosen to stand at Olan's side, after all. He had snatched her from Whiles' custody at the Logchain and offered her a place in his lifeboat to ride out the coming storm. The only other option had been to die along with the rest of the world, and that was no choice at all.

  Now she saw that it was the only choi
ce that mattered.

  She'd thought going to James While in the super-Array might be a moment of triumph, exorcising thirteen years of self-doubt, but it was anything but. Huddled there in his chair, so pathetic yet hopeful, so withered and pained, it had not felt like a victory to crack his ribs and usher him into Olan Harrison's hands. It was just proof of how much a slave she had become herself.

  So when she knelt before him in his glass cell at the Redoubt, and looked into his eyes to see a pain that could never be excised, she realized how cowardly she'd been.

  She'd never seen that pain in the others they'd brought down; Olan Harrison must have swamped it beneath his influence, but in James While she saw the full depths. The dislocation inherent in the Lazarus protocol was carved into his desperate, fragmented mind, and cut through her on the line like a sickness.

  Man wasn't meant to come back, it said.

  She'd meant to ask him questions. They'd been a muddle in her head, confused with the distracting thoughts of missiles to trick Olan, but no questions were necessary in the end. The bloodied splinters of his once-great mind were too much for her to bear, and he had been on the line for hours only before the Redoubt pulled his agonized signal down. Olan Harrison had been up there for a year. For a year his mind had frayed, almost entirely alone on the line, and the thought of it terrified her.

  If James While's eyes were a window into hell, what was she seeing when she looked into Olan Harrison's? What did that make him now, what chaotic fault lines were bursting inside his head, desperate to find a way to make their pain end?

  In that moment hunched by the glass, everything Olan had done took on a terrifying, torturous slant. The severing of their threads was just the beginning. The 'boxing' of those who rebelled was a crime against humanity of the greatest order. But what of the souls brought down from the line? Hundreds had rejoined them already. They'd never had any choice. They were forced into bodies that didn't match their minds, forced into boxes that kept their pain crushed beneath the surface so they were never able to speak of it, couldn't even show it in any of their words or deeds.