Lung heaved on the door, putting all of his superhuman strength behind it. It barely budged.
“Take her,” Alexandria said.
Lung took Gully’s body.
Alexandria pushed. A crack appeared in the ceiling, dust showering down on top of us.
“Structural,” Number Man said. “If we open it, it’ll cave in on us.”
“This does not concern me,” Lung said. “Stand back, and I will push my way through.”
Golem shook his head. “Eventually, but what about the time it takes to burrow through? We can’t afford it.”
The Doctor was looking down at the vial.
“If we’re going to win this,” I said, “I want it to be because of our strength, not an abstract one. And I know that sounds corny.”
“A nice sentiment,” the Number Man said. “But I’m afraid that power you’re digging for is out of your reach, Weaver.”
I looked at him.
“Or it’s already in your reach. You can’t have a second trigger because you already had one,” he said.
I blinked.
“Given the signature, it’s very possible you had two trigger events in quick succession. Not uncommon. The horror of manifesting your power, it prompted another trigger.”
“No,” I said. “There’s got to be something.”
“If there is, a second trigger event isn’t it,” the Number Man said. “I can check your allies, but we can’t do much more. We used to rely on Contessa’s power to determine the exact event needed for a second trigger.”
I nodded numbly.
“I’m sorry,” Imp said.
I shook my head. I’d staked hopes on this, despite promises to myself that I wouldn’t.
Beside me, the Doctor removed the black rubber cork from the vial.
The Siberian appeared beside us in the same instant. Manton spoke, “He finally took action and struck my Siberian.”
I could sense Scion above. Staring at the corridor with the vials.
He reached out, and a golden light flared. It was like a flicker of the lights, and it was so vivid I thought for a second I was seeing it with my own eyes.
The vials each shattered simultaneously.
Glass and fluids rained down onto the floor. My bugs were swamped all along the corridor.
Scion moved, killing my bugs on contact as he headed down to the next floor.
With my bugs, I could sense Number Man letting the wand go. It clattered to the stairs below him. “Broken.”
Broken?
Lung created flame for us to see by.
The Doctor stood there, her hands mangled where she’d been holding the vial, bleeding wounds at her throat.
“Your hands,” Manton said.
She shook her head. “S- superficial.”
There was a pause.
“Did you drink any?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Barely any.”
I looked down at the stairs. Lap it up?
No. Something Skidmark or Newter had said, once upon a time. My first introduction to the vials.
And she’d said she needed a whole power. Would a partial dose only give half a power? A distorted one?
I could only guess.
“Okay,” I said. “Siberian… make us a path around the door.”
Manton nodded, as if I’d talked to him. Siberian walked into the wall, her power crushing stone. The rest of us moved up the stairwell, closer to Scion.
“Guys,” Imp said.
Lung had to move to cast the light on her.
She held Sveta’s sphere. Fractures marked the entire surface, and they spread with every passing second.
I withdrew my crystal-encased knife. “Lung?”
He took hold of it with one hand, nearly singing me with the heat of the flame that had surrounded the limb moments ago. He crushed it, winced as the knife ate through the claw at the end of his thumb.
I gingerly took hold of the knife, switched the settings to remove the disintegration effect, then started it up again.
It took a full four seconds. The calibration was off, stuff clogged. Not a big surprise.
“Halfway,” Manton said. “No sign of collapse.”
Scion appeared at the top of the stairs.
Leaving us without a place to even run to.
“A third trigger event,” I said. “Is it-”
“No,” the Doctor said.
“There has to be a way.”
“There isn’t one,” she said. “You have the power you have, nothing more.”
“Okay,” I answered.
“Hey,” Imp said, “Your power isn’t the only one that’s shit in this circumstance.”
The orb bucked, the fracturing doubling in quantity.
Then it broke.
Sveta hit the ground, and then unfurled. Tendrils extended up the stairs, encircling Scion.
“Focus on him,” she said. “Oh god. Focus on him. It’s him and me, we’re the only people here.”
The others were disappearing into the tunnel. Rachel, Imp, Canary, the Doctor’s group…
“Can’t…” Sveta said.
The Doctor headed into the tunnel.
A tendril encircled one of the Doctor’s ruined hands.
The Doctor screamed. I could hear bone breaking, see blood welling around the thin tendril of living razor wire.
Sveta’s tendrils continued to extend, stretching out.
Each one chose the Doctor as the mark.
“Had to pick someone,” Sveta whispered. “Couldn’t focus on him alone. I’m sorry, but you’re the best choice.”
The tendrlis found points closer to the Doctor’s midsection, crushing.
The Doctor’s screams became strangled.
Sveta coiled around the Doctor, burying the woman beneath overlapping tendrils, until there was a cocoon and a girl’s face, curled up on the stairs. Blood pooled beneath them.
Scion continued his approach.
I held my ground, forming swarm-decoys. They hadn’t worked last time, but-
Nothing. He walked past them.
I held my knife, waited as he closed the distance, standing in his way. I slashed at his throat, dragged the blade along his chest.
Smoke rose, billowing in quantities I couldn’t have imagined.
He pushed me aside.
Walking towards the door.
I realized what was about to happen. My mind was all noise as I screamed out a warning using my swarm, telling the others to get away.
I reached out and grabbed Sveta’s face, the point from which all the tendrils extended. An action carried out in panic. I felt a tendril or two wrap around my forearm. Hand and arm obliterated.
I just got a new one, I thought, almost dazed.
Scion pushed his way past the door. The door that was bearing the load of the ceiling above us.
Sveta dropped the doctor, and I felt the tendrils brush past me, ensnaring bugs. Then they snapped out, grabbing the door at the top of the staircase.
In the next instant, we were pulled to the door, virtually thrown. I used my flight pack to try and break the fall, to stop from being turned into a smear, but Sveta caught the brunt of the impact, webbing out to ensnare our surroundings.
The ceiling came down. A whole section of the substructure, apparently damaged, cracked by the fall or by some native impurity.
The dust settled.
And I saw what Scion had come for.
His partner.
29.08
The stairwell was buried under chunks of concrete and steel large and heavy enough to flatten trucks, but the ceiling was high, and the gap in it gave me a view of the chamber beyond, lit by the red emergency lights. My view of Scion was obstructed by the rubble on the stairs, but I saw the golden glow that he cast off.
He was so small, so far away.
The partner, so massive.
The room looked like an aircraft hangar. My bugs reached out, and I could only sense the three wal
ls closest to me. Vast.
The partner filled the space, beautiful in a way I struggled to put words to. It was like a volcano mid-eruption, stone mingled with the orange-red magma, spray or smoke reaching incredible heights… it was breathtaking in the sheer elemental nature of it, fascinating, beautiful, and so incomprehensible I couldn’t have understood it with decades of study.
But where the volcano was driven by seismic movements, I was pretty sure, and the storm by wind, this was driven by something else. Just as basic, on a level.
An idea, half-formed, captured in a moment.
It conjured up images an artist’s sketchpad, putting body parts on the page, trying variations. There, in the sliver of the chamber I could make out, there was flesh, a soft gray, lit by the red emergency lighting. It might have been menacing, but the lines had a softness to them, and every part was positioned in an almost gentle manner. The individual parts were androgynous, as a rule, but they veered into the slightly masculine, the slightly feminine, even alien, territories.
Always, there was something to take the threat out of it. One long-fingered hand, upturned, pinky and ring fingers curled slightly, as if reaching down to offer aid. Another hand, more childish, the underside and palm white, before fading into the gray colors the other parts shared, vulnerable like a dog with its throat or belly exposed. Another still, with water running down it, streams of the liquid running between and down fingers, more a piece of art than a limb intended for use. There were countless more I couldn’t see, couldn’t spare the bugs to study them.
I could look at any one piece, and I could see the beauty in it. Any number of these could have been blended together, mixed and matched to create a human being. Not overtly male or female, but no doubt kind in appearance.
Then, at the same time, there was the bigger picture, only a glimpse of it in the far end of the staircase, through the part of the ceiling that had collapsed in that massive room… this jungle of flesh, like parts of a doll waiting to be assembled. Artificial, everything in the wrong scale. There was a pattern to it, like there was a pattern to the movement of the waves in the ocean storm, but I didn’t have access to the underlying logic. I could only get a general sense of which direction the wind had been blowing.
Here and there, flesh connected to flesh. In other places, the flesh broke down into core elements, expanses of skin, veins, muscle and bone, all with hints of the same art of experimentation the larger pieces had. Where flesh didn’t connect to other pieces, it broke down further into other things, into fractals and patterns, then into things or spaces I couldn’t make out, like it had turned around a corner that didn’t exist.
Sveta released of my forearm, and the resulting pain hauled me out of an awestruck daze.
Her tendrils found targets with a speed my eyes couldn’t follow, and she wrapped herself around the table that had held the vials.
It took a moment before every tendril was set in place. When she was done, she let her head sink down until her face was pressed against the tabletop, her eyes shut.
Blood ran down my mangled arm, soaking into the fabric of my costume and then oozing out slowly at points where the skin was tightest against the surface. Normally, it might have been my knuckles, my forearm. Here, it was the parts that hadn’t been wrapped by the tendril, bulging out.
At the very least, the armor on my costume and the nature of the fabric had kept the tendrils from simply slicing through the flesh like razor wire. The armor was mangled, but it had saved me a severed artery.
I felt the limb throb, as if it were responding to the fact that I was paying attention to it. It made for an eerie sensation, where the dull sensation felt so out of tune with the degree of injury, yet so great, compared to the little that remained of the limb.
“Shit,” I said.
“Don’t,” Sveta said. “Don’t move, don’t talk.”
I went still, even as the dull throb in my arm got worse. I was losing blood, though not as much as I thought I should be.
Better than one of those things going around my neck.
“Don’t move, don’t talk. You’re not there,” she murmured, barely audible.
My eyes moved to the stairwell and the scene below. My teammates were there. Lung and Canary were as well.
“The only ones here are me and my thoughts,” Sveta said. Her eyes were shut. “I am in control of my mind and my feelings, and I am focused. I am confident, and I am building towards a better future for myself. Every success is a component in building that up, a brick on a building in construction, but my mistakes do not tear it down.”
The stand she was wrapped around creaked.
“My mistakes do not tear it down. They are a part of me, but they are not the most important part of me.”
Hurry, I thought.
Uncharitable, maybe, but I couldn’t afford to sit back and bleed to death while she worked through this. I understood that she had her problems, that control was hard to come by.
I got that, but my friends could die down there, if the collapse hadn’t killed them already.
Sveta let go of the table. Her tendrils extended into the air around her, like a sea anemone’s fronds. Here and there, they touched things and snapped into place with a destructive power: the refrigerator that had held the Balance sample, a shelving unit, a countertop with drawers in front..
They caught on the bugs in the area, and they extinguished my swarm with an almost ruthless efficiency. Too many tendrils for my bugs to navigate between them, the movements too unpredictable as they drifted in the air, responding to air currents. The tendrils were severing steel handles on the drawers, a bug’s flesh was nothing.
My flesh was nothing. The longest of them came dangerously close to making contact with me.
“I’m going to leave,” she said. From the tone and the volume, she was talking to herself, trying to convince herself to move.
To be a bystander in your own body, I thought.
I felt a more serious pain building in my arm. Something more representative of the damage that had been done to it.
“I’m going where there aren’t any people,” Sveta said, again.
Go, I thought.
Tendrils found the ragged edges where the ceiling above the stairwell had cracked. Sveta launched herself into the stairwell as though she were a living slingshot. Tendrils splayed out in every direction to stop her forward momentum, arresting her nearly as fast as she’d moved. Then she reached out again, and was gone into the morass of body parts below, with its dim red lighting.
She was gone.
Yet I couldn’t bring myself to move.
The pain in my arm had me rattled. It was intense, yet disconnected in a way. An alarm system that wailed with lights flashing, but it was somewhere off to one side, in another room somewhere.
I didn’t want to be in a metaphorical room with that pain. The second my blood started pounding, the moment I set my foot down to run and an impact reverberated through my body, this sharp, violent pain would become something else entirely.
Instead, I activated my flight pack. To get myself moving, I pushed off the ground, floating into the stairwell.
When I reached the first chunk of rubble, I set one foot on it and drove myself forward, with as smooth and gentle a motion as I could manage. The flight pack managed a decent speed, but any help was a good thing.
Another chunk of rubble, another kick forward.
More of the room below came into view. The staircase was as long as it was because the impossibly large room needed a high ceiling. Now I was getting the full view, rather than a sliver of it all, coupled with the input from my bugs. I could see just how much of the partner’s flesh filled the space, flooding whole areas, interlocking or simply arranged side by side. Nearly three stories high, and many of the parts reached from floor to ceiling.
I pushed my swarm through the space, and I could feel a kind of disorientation. Something I’d experienced before, in mild doses. I directed
my bugs from points A to B, except they only made it partway, or they moved too far, or they arrived at a slightly different location.
Ominous.
And it wasn’t the only thing that caught my attention, as I increased my speed, descending towards Scion and the others. There was a creaking noise. The groan of a structure settling, of tired floorboards and hinges in dire need of oiling.
It didn’t stop. I couldn’t tell with my ears, but my swarm had a range of hearing that extended beyond the human spectrum. Through that distorted sense, I could tell that there was a sound that was gradually getting worse. A screeching, tearing noise.
At my command, bugs moved away from the second entity, away from Scion and the rubble, and they headed up.
The combination of fine sensory input and the hundreds of bugs told me the tremors were worse in specific spots, the cracks deeper in spots.
It formed a map of sorts. Where the cracks were, the tremors and creaks, areas stood out as danger zones.
I passed the patch of blood and mangled flesh where the doctor had fallen. Some of the tendrils had crushed their way through bone, severing the skull in half. Others had found their way into the cracks between joints, sawing through connective tissues, muscle and skin to completely detach the limbs. If any part of her had still been alive, the rubble had crushed it when it had fallen.
I accelerated my forward momentum with another gentle kick.
Chunks of the ceiling dropped. I didn’t slow, only using the senses the bugs offered along with the flight pack to move out of the way well before they could reach me.
As I’d done with the rubble, I kicked off a falling section of the ceiling, to better change direction and propel myself forward.
I found the others. Golem was almost invisible as he created hands of concrete to shield himself, Cuff and Imp. I’d nearly mistaken his hands for one of the false ones. The only difference was that his hands moved, for a little while.
Rachel had an unconscious Canary slung over her lap. Lung had foregone riding Bastard to run on his own, loping forward on all fours, climbing more than he ran. It was too hard to move through this labyrinth, where the pale gray flesh occupied as much space as it left untouched. Easier for Lung to lunge forward, grab an empty eye socket, then leap forward onto an outstretched arm. The dogs found solid surfaces to leap onto and away from.
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