by Conner, Jack
“Yes," he said. "There's a way."
The two emerged onto a plaza that was full of smoke and screams, where Tavlin and the boy paused to gasp for breath and wipe gore from their hair.
“Well?” Tavlin pressed.
“There’s tunnels up above, through the rock of the ceiling. Smugglers used to use them.” With a crooked grin, the boy added, “Still do.”
Tavlin didn’t know what the boy and his people smuggled and didn’t care. “Then let’s be going.”
More screams filtered up from below.
“This way,” the boy said, and led them up a ramp. Bodies littered the ground around them, as well as signs of great destruction, as though a hurricane had swept through, but hopefully the creatures that had done this had already passed on.
Tavlin started to go with the boy, then paused.
“What’re you waiting for?” the boy said, as he ushered the others up the ramp.
“I have to go back for somebody.”
The boy looked at him as though he were mad—worse, as though he were one of the walking dead. “Change your mind, I’ll be at the end of the Ale-Maru.” Tavlin knew this was another hanging section like the Singh-Hiss, the one that terminated in the clock.
Tavlin nodded, then turned away. The boy and the others vanished up the ramp, into the chaos. Tavlin wished them well, but he had something he had to do.
Sophia, be ready.
Chapter 7
Tavlin picked his way through the rubble, trying to keep to the shadows along the walls. Green fire ate at several of the buildings and he was forced to take wide detours. Groups of survivors huddled in hiding spots, which were not very good if he could spot them. Some motioned for him to join them, some made threatening gestures when he came too close, others just studied his gore-coated body. His shirt and pants were both sticking to him, and he smelled something foul. He thought dissolved bits of flesh had gone up his nostrils. Some had definitely clogged his ears. He constantly spat out what tasted like blood, and chewier bits caught in his teeth and under his tongue.
At last he reached Sophia’s tenement. Warily, he entered the smoking doorway, past the sagging, half-melted doors. Screams and fumes already issued from a lower floor than the one he had entered on, but if his orientation was right Sophia lived on the level above. Not daring to hope, he mounted quickly and found her door. Knocked hard. Then again. No one answered.
“Shit.”
He began kicking down the door, calling her name as he did. The door splintered open and he stumbled in, blinking his eyes in the darkness. She had doused all the lights.
“Sophia!”
No one answered.
He found her in the bedroom. She had crawled under the bed and clutched a ridiculously large pistol in her hands. He thought she was going to take his head off with it when he got on his hands and knees to look under the bed. He could barely see her face around the enormity of the barrel.
“It’s me,” he said.
“I know. Why do you think I’m pointing a gun at you?”
“The G’zai are on the floor below. They’ll be here soon. We need to leave.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll kill us.”
“No,” she said. “Why are they here?”
“Because they’re pre-human monsters with no human motivation.”
“Bullshit. They’re doing this because of you, aren’t they? I don’t know how, or why, but I know it’s you.”
“Soph ...”
“If I shot you now and left you for them, would they be satisfied? Or perhaps I need to hand you over to them alive.” The blackness inside the barrel looked very dark. He could just see one of Sophia’s eyes glimmer slightly around one side of the bulging bullet chambers.
“We don’t have time for this,” he said.
The gun continued to point straight at him. “They want your briefcase, don’t they? That’s what all this is about. But you’ve hidden it somewhere. So if I shoot you, they won’t get it, and I can only think that would be a good thing for the world.”
The same thought had occurred to him. “They’re underwater creatures, Soph. I hid it underwater. Finding me will probably hurry up them getting it, but they’ll get it one way or another. But if I live, maybe I can think of something to do about all this. Some way to stop them.”
The destruction on the floor below grew louder.
“Sophia,” he said, almost growling.
She sighed. He heard a click and realized she was shoving the hammer back. She had actually drawn the hammer!
“Well, it was a thought,” she said. She crawled out from under the bed, and he stepped back. She glanced him over, wrinkling her nose. “What the hell happened to you?”
He grabbed her free hand and pulled her from the room. She shook loose of him and said, “They’re in league with the Octs, aren’t they—the G’zai?”
“Less talk, more running.”
He stuck his head through the splintered front door, looked one way, then the other. He stepped through, his own gun drawn and ready. Motioned for her to follow. The smell of smoke was very strong now. The vibration of the tower beneath them trembled up through the soles of his feet.
He and Sophia ran up a flight of stairs, then another. He didn’t know this tenement well, but he assumed it would have exits onto all of the major platforms it abutted. All around him he heard the sounds of residents barricading their doors and sealing up any windows onto the hallways. A few realized the tower was doomed and were fleeing upwards, the same as he and Sophia. They encountered more and more deserters as they rose.
“You have a plan?” Sophia said, as they mounted one tight, smoke-filled stairway.
“Go up.”
“Fire rises, and there’s no escape.”
“There might be. Just follow me.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t I go off on my own?”
They emerged from the stairway, coughing and rubbing their eyes. Tavlin saw the stream of people headed in a certain direction and knew that must be the way out. Before following them, he turned to Sophia and said, “We used to say we were in it together, remember?”
She watched him, cold and furious at the same time. “We’re not in it together anymore.”
“Maybe for just a little while.”
The tower shuddered.
“Maybe,” she said “For just a very small while.” Then: “This better work.”
With more conviction than he felt, he said, “It will.”
He pushed his way through the crowd, and Sophia followed—perhaps reluctantly, but she followed. They emerged, coughing from the fumes, onto a hanging bridge that shook and trembled under the weight of so many people. Clearly it was not meant to support the number that currently trampled across it, trying to escape the burning, G’zai-infested tenement. Tavlin winced at the sounds of snapping cables around him. With each twang and pop, the bridge trembled. Please hold, please hold.
They made it across. Judging by the sounds of pounding feet and heavy breathing behind him, the bridge did not immediately collapse behind them. That was good. Of course, it also meant the G’zai could follow them over it.
The press of people led into a series of plazas, bridges and ramps. This was the busy metropolitan area of Taluush, and platforms mounted by all manner of shops, restaurants and bars arced through the thick junkheap towers like mushroom tops, or perhaps lily pads, each one higher than the next and connected by bridges and walkways, even rope swings. From below came the glow of green fire.
It all stank of smoke and panic. The air was filled with the sounds of rending metal, crackling flames and screams. To Tavlin’s left a gang of mutants looted a clothing shop. To his right another group barricaded their own shop.
A great, unanimous scream issued from behind, and Sophia clutched Tavlin’s hand. “The bridge fell,” she whispered. She realized she was gripping his hand and dropped it.
“This way,”
he said and ran toward a particular ramp, then into a tower.
Sometimes he had to push and shove his way through the crowd, but at last they stepped from an upper level onto the high, vertigo-inducing walkways of the Ale-Maru, a large, tubular section that, like the Singh-Hiss, hung suspended horizontally from the cistern cavern ceiling. The Ale-Maru sprouted from the tower Tavlin and Sophia had just left and merged with a great, dripping stalactite, coated in slime and ash, on its far end—a thick stalactite that must drop to its point seventy feet or so below the ceiling. Flails flew around it, their undersides lit by the weird green glow of the fires. It was the stalactite the great town clock was set into, and the clock faces—all three of them, at equidistant points all around—blazed the time, with the second hand ticking down the fate of the city, as if to say, The end is coming.
Wind tore at Tavlin’s clothes and hair, a breeze spurred by the flames. Few people occupied the scaffolding that supported the walkways, and he knew that most would be barricading their doors within. He and Sophia passed darkened shops and dives, all seedy and depressed-looking. This had obviously not been a thriving area of the city. The ground looked very far away, and the many towers, platforms and flames between this hanging branch and the water level gave the perspective a certain franticness that made Tavlin feel queasy.
He and Sophia picked their way toward the far end of the Ale-Maru, where it was pressed into the giant clock stalactite, just as the whole structure began to shake violently. He glanced back to see that the tower it sprouted from was crumbling. Green flames licked most of the way up its length, climbing higher by the second. Soon it would reach the Ale-Maru and begin eating into it as well. Tavlin wondered if the Ale-Maru could stay intact if the tower collapsed. Many thin wires, and a few thick ones, held it up, and they were bolted securely into the stone and metal of the cistern ceiling. But how securely?
“Where are we going, damnit?” Sophia asked.
“The boy said to meet him at the end of the Ale-Maru. He must’ve meant where it joins the clock face.”
“There are chambers in it, I know that much. People work there, in the clockwork.”
“I guess there must be a secret passage from the machinery rooms into smugglers’ tunnels.”
He pressed on, heart pounding, sweat weeping from every pore, keeping the blood that caked him from solidifying. His eyes scanned the way ahead for signs of the boy.
Nothing.
That was when events took an unexpected turn.
Suddenly, Tavlin heard a peculiar hiss, as of waves breaking along a shore—a strange shore, as if formed of some unfathomable material, and a strange sea, as if the water moved too slowly, too thickly, and the sound only heard over a radio broadcast, full of metallic crackling. At the same time, the lighting changed. Green-white illumination pulsed off the walls and scaffolding around him. Shocked, Tavlin drew back, nearly tumbling off the walkway into the oblivion to the left of him. Sophia grabbed him. Her eyes were wide, too.
“What is it?” she said.
Tavlin opened his mouth to answer but could only fumble for words. No, not her, not now ...
The air crackled behind them, a great hissing vortex of energy. Tavlin and Sophia spun. Out of the vortex flowed a form, all of white, phantasmagorical vapor spilling everywhere, taking strange shapes. The vapor drifted forward, tall and roiling, then it parted in the middle like some alien, ghostly flower, and the girl appeared—the witch-girl, the girl in white—beautiful, naked, otherworldly. Light shone from her eyes.
A finger stabbed at Tavlin. “You took it. Why, oh why did you take it?”
Her voice seemed to come from far away, and it had an odd echo to it. The way she said the words almost sounded as though she cared for Tavlin, as if by taking "it" he had betrayed her in some way.
Tavlin backed away, Sophia at his side. “I—I—”
Sophia raised her gun. Fired. The bullet punched through the ghost-girl as if she were made of air, and perhaps she was, or nothing more solid at any rate. Sophia fired again, and again, to the same result.
Behind the ghost-girl, green fire consumed the tower. Leaping flames began to eat into the Ale-Maru, silhouetting the girl in surreal tones. The flames could just vaguely be seen through her luminous form.
“Where is it?” she said. “Where did you take it?”
Tavlin backed way, careful not to tumble off the edge. “Y-you should know,” he said. “You seem able to follow me anywhere. What are you?”
The phantom threw back her head and screamed, “Here! Here he is! Take him!”
The G’zai must have heard her, for Tavlin saw them pour out of the tower, tall and white, their tendrils whipping the air about them, black eyes unblinking. The young ghost woman drifted forward, but even as her fingers locked about Tavlin’s neck—with him thrashing and throwing himself backward—she dissipated into white smoke, then not even that.
The G’zai took her place, scuttling forward through the scaffolding, both awkward-looking and amazingly limber. And fast. They closed the distance with horrifying speed. People within the structure fired at them—Tavlin saw the flashes through shop windows—and the G’zai responded. Tendrils dipped inside cavities of the Ale-Maru and dragged out screaming, thrashing victims, who were promptly engulfed in flames or ripped apart in bloody showers.
Sophia raised her gun to fire at them. Tavlin let loose, too. The G’zai drove on, not even pausing.
Tavlin shoved the gun away. Still one bullet left.
“Run!” he said.
He scrambled toward the clock face. Cursing, Sophia followed. The hissing and chittering of the G’zai grew louder. Closer. The scaffolding thumped and shook as they climbed. The roar of fire grew louder. Tavlin heard a loud snap and spun to see that one of the four main strands of cables that held the Ale-Maru up had torn.
The Ale-Maru vibrated underfoot. People screamed inside.
A great squeal and a terrible roar sounded behind him. He craned his head to see the tower the Ale-Maru was connected to collapse, slowly, in stages, sagging away while flames gushed up from it. Bits of metal and debris plumed out in gunmetal clouds that glittered where chunks caught the light. The tower struck a platform, then another, and kept listing, falling away, taking out more and more of the city with it, until finally the dust of its passage obscured it from sight. Surprisingly, it didn’t drag the Ale-Maru with it as Tavlin had feared, but it tried; the Ale-Maru extended wide out to the side, pulled by the tower, and then the links broke in loud pops, hardly distinguishable over the other noises, and after that the tower fell, and the Ale-Maru, flexing and bending, swayed back the other way, its endpoint, anchoring the structure into the great stalactite, crumpling hideously.
Stomach lurching, Tavlin grabbed on tight. Beside him, Sophia did likewise.
As the Ale-Maru mashed against the clock stalactite, the wires holding it up broke, one by one, unable to support its weight without the tower. Now only the cluster of wires at the far end, near the clock, held any part of it up.
As if swung on a pivot, the Ale-Maru fell, and Tavlin and Sophia flattened themselves and hung on as the horizontal branch now became a vertical one. Metal screamed, as did hundreds of people still trapped within the structure. Tavlin glanced back to see that several of the G’zai had been thrown off and were even then falling away into the madness of the city, their pale-white forms writhing against the green glow.
Nauseous with vertigo, Tavlin climbed upward, toward the stalactite. Only one strand of wires held the Ale-Maru up.
“Hurry!” he said. They had to reach the clockwork passages before the wires snapped.
Movement in the stalactite. A shadow appeared, and he realized it was some sort of opening, just below one of the great clock faces. A figure in it beckoned to him. The boy! It must be the boy. Clicking gears arced behind him, ticking down to the end, etched in the red glow of an alchemical lamp. Tavlin climbed toward him. Sophia followed. The figure gestured them on.
; A pall of smoke shifted. Tavlin saw who it was in the cave mouth, what must be the entrance to the maintenance shafts of the town clock. It was not the boy. It was a man, a tall man in a dark overcoat, framed against the clicking doomsday gears. He had a face carved of granite, square of head and jaw, completely bald. He had had some sort of pox as a youth, and scars pitted his face. The coldest, clearest blue eyes that Tavlin had ever seen shone out of that ravaged visage. Above them hunched shaggy white eyebrows, almost grandfatherly. Betraying no emotion, he said, “Hurry! You can still make it!”
Bodies lay at his feet. Tavlin could not see if the boy’s was among them, but surely it must be. The bald man had murdered them all, all the survivors of the boy's little smuggler clan, or whatever it was. Other figures stood behind the bald man, impossible to see in the dimness.
“Come!” he shouted. “If you don’t, you’ll die!”
Tavlin hesitated. The structure swayed like an out of control pendulum beneath him. People screamed in terror inside it. Green fires licked up from its lower end, and, silhouetted against them, the nightmare shapes of the G’zai crawled closer. They were so close now Tavlin could smell them, all ammonia and brine.
Tavlin aimed. The bald man showed no fear. Tavlin fired. He only had one shot left in his gun, but it fired true. He struck the last strand of cable holding the Ale-Maru up, and the structure fell away. His stomach dropped, and he nearly went spinning out into the abyss. He just barely managed to grab on in time. The Ale-Maru dropped, and dropped, metal squealing, wind shrieking. Sophia cursed him so loudly he could hear it. The Ale-Maru smashed into one platform, then another, and another. With each jolt Tavlin thought he would be flung off into space, but each time he just barely managed to cling to the structure’s surface. His hands bled from the grip.