by Chris Ward
The spider leapt around a corner, skidding to a brief stop. Jun gasped. The massive ornate façade of La Sagrada Familia loomed in front of him. The façade itself was eighty metres high, four ornate towers rising high above the doors, poking up into the sky like giant upturned ice cream cones. Beyond them eight other towers made up the twelve for the Apostles, while rising out of the great church’s centre were the twin behemoths for Mary and Jesus, the latter topped with a huge cross a hundred and seventy metres above the city streets.
It would have been awe inspiring in different circumstances. As it was, Jun wanted to get off before the spider got through the crack in those huge wooden doors. He twisted, pulling Nozomi against him, looking for a safe place to jump down, but the spider leapt forward again. Its knees rose and fell like the pistons of a textiles loom, the edges of its joints sharp enough to slice through clothes and skin.
They rattled across a wide courtyard lined with trees and idyllic ponds, Jun hanging on to Nozomi with one hand, the other holding on to a tuft of hair on the spider’s back. He held the gun in the same hand he had hooked around the girl, and tried to angle it down towards the spider, hoping for a clean shot. If he could get it dead centre, maybe he could—
A roar came from the streets to their left and suddenly the space in front of them was filled with milling people, a fiery cascade of rioters carrying poles and stakes and knives and an assortment of other makeshift weapons. In seconds they had filled the space in front of the great doors and were trying to find a way in.
The spider didn’t break stride. It scuttled up the nearest tree, pushing itself through the foliage, the leaves and branches ripping at Jun’s face, threatening to pull both him and Nozomi off. Then it was balancing delicately on top of the tree, bracing itself before leaping forward and landing in the next like some tree-hopping monkey. As rioters milled in the park spaces below them, the spider advanced on La Sagrada Familia like a jungle commando, unseen.
The trees were running out. There was an open space of about fifty metres between the park and the entrance to the great church. It might once have been a road, but was now a sea of pushing and shoving people.
Beside him, Nozomi groaned, but didn’t open her eyes. Jun pulled her tight, wrapping his legs around the body of the spider as it prepared to jump.
‘Hang on,’ he whispered.
The air filled with a booming roar that made Jun’s teeth rattle in his chest. Like standing close to a ship’s foghorn, he felt like a blanket of the air itself had forced its way into his ears. All around them, people began to scream and fall to the ground, hands covering their ears as the spider leapt out from the trees and landed on hard paving stones. The sound came again, emanating out from transmitters built into the spider’s knee joints. Some kind of defence or attack mechanism, he couldn’t tell, but it had cleared them a way to the doors, and the spider began sprinting down the channel, the chattering of its feet muffled by the dull hum still filling Jun’s ears.
The doors were closed. Perhaps Kurou was inside, controlling them. The crowd was already beginning to recover from the shockwave, people climbing drunkenly to their feet and moving back towards the doors.
The spider didn’t break pace as the doors loomed up in front of them. Jun was sure it was going to crash right through. He remembered giant bears breaking through doors and walls, tearing holes in masonry, but the spider was barely the size of a small horse. It had no chance against the heavy wooden doors of the grandest church in Christendom.
The doors were nearly close enough to touch. Jun closed his eyes, thinking absurdly of how soft a layer of snow would feel over his head, then he was jerked backwards as the spider leapt into the air. Jun opened his eyes to see a metal cable dart from the spider’s jaws and hook itself over a ridge in one of the towers. The spider began to retract it, hauling them up the front of the church as people screamed at them from the ground. Jun held Nozomi close with one arm, the other holding on to the back of the spider.
Then they were over the edge of a balcony into the nearest tower, fifty metres off the ground. The spider raced towards a set of stairs in the corner and bustled down them, its feet echoing on the stones like machine gun fire. Jun’s ears were only just beginning to recover, and he shifted on the spider’s back, again looking for a chance to escape. Then the wire it had used to haul them up the front of the church shot out again, this time wrapping tight around his waist, pinning Nozomi against him and his arms to his sides.
From below came strange rumblings through the stone, like the hum of distant machinery. They bumped around a corner into a small antechamber with two doors leading off, one large one and another smaller one. Through the larger door the sounds came louder. Jun shifted, trying to get a grip on the gun as the spider ran up to the door and began to work at the handle with its front legs.
Something was wrong. The spider was scrabbling away, scratching and trying to pull back the heavy bolt. Nozomi lifted her head, her eyes half-lidded, and gave a drunken giggle. ‘Dumb things can’t open doors,’ she muttered, then dropped her head back to Jun’s chest.
The spider paused. Jun felt the wire around his arms loosen. He tried to twist the gun, but it was pressed against his own leg.
You need the wire to open the door.
The spider paused. Jun wondered if it was communicating with Crow or whether it had its own intelligence. Then with a whizzing sound the wire retracted, whipping Jun’s body so hard it ripped through his clothes and cut into the skin of his back. He cried out in pain as the spider’s wire twisted around the large bolt and pulled it free. The door swung wide, revealing a vast chamber. The floor was nearly empty, but a tangle of wires like vines hung from the ceiling, draping almost low enough to touch the chairs on the floor below. There was no sign of Crow, but on the ceiling of the church Jun could see a shifting blanket of metal, more spiders and others doing something only Crow could understand. His skin crawled at the sight of it, and his heart ached for all those he had lost.
‘Kill it!’ Nozomi cried as the spider scuttled forward, the wire detracting again, twisting towards them.
Jun turned his gun hand just before the wire pushed it against his leg, and angled it down towards the body of the creature. How thick was the metal? Would the bullet penetrate it?
The sound of the gunshot pierced through the fog of his hearing like a dart. The spider jerked underneath him, and a black substance oozed out of the hole in the metal. It let out a wailing screech as the legs on one side buckled and collapsed. The other four continued to move, sending it into a bizarre spin, one side of its body scraping the floor.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jun said, pulling Nozomi tight to his side and leaping sideways. They hit the floor hard, the spider’s leg leaving a deep gash in Jun’s thigh.
He didn’t have time to cry out. Someone somewhere was shouting at him, while the sounds from above had changed pitch as if every monstrosity in the building had turned to watch the battle on the ground. Pulling Nozomi along beside him, he staggered back through the door they had just come through and pulled it closed, sliding the bolt across.
‘On my back.’
Nozomi was mercifully light as he pulled her arms around his neck and lifted her up into a piggyback. He was too weak to carry her back up the tower so he could only hope to find somewhere safe to hide through the other door that led out of the antechamber.
No sounds of pursuit came as they entered a dim, empty corridor that seemed designed for storage or moving equipment out of view of the rest of the church. Gone were the ornate stylings and the complex architecture; it looked like a factory basement complete with bland ceiling strip lights and the occasional fire door. Jun tried a couple, but everything was locked. He had checked the gun and found the clip empty. With no more bullets left its only use was as a decoy that might buy them some time.
‘What did you do to me?’ Nozomi whispered into his ear as Jun pushed through a pair of double doors into a corridor that loo
ked much the same as the one they had come from. He pulled across a bolt on the doors and let Nozomi down. She sat down heavily on the floor as if her legs no longer worked. Jun looked at her for a moment, torn by indecision. He wanted to keep moving, but he was exhausted and hurt. He needed to rest for a minute or he would be no use to either of them.
‘I took a chance,’ he said, sitting down beside her and leaning back against the cold stone wall. ‘I’ve seen what Crow can do, what he can put inside people.’
‘My head is killing me.’
Jun smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re still alive. You have no idea how much.’
‘My eyes hurt and I have the worst headache. You could have killed me.’
‘I think I stopped you from killing me.’
‘I hate you,’ she said, but the old conviction and revile was gone.
‘I know you hate me, but a little less than before.’
Nozomi sighed. ‘I don’t know what to think anymore. You didn’t kill my mother, did you?’
Jun felt a knot forming in his stomach. He wanted to be sick. ‘Is that the lie he’s always told you?’
‘She blamed you with her last words, and he’s never let me forget it.’
Jun paused, trying to find the right words. ‘I guess it depends how you look at it. She died because I tried to save her, but he let her die. Her life was in his hands, and I don’t think he had any intention of letting her go free. His mind doesn’t work that way. He doesn’t consider life important like most people do.’
‘We’re just tools.’
‘Is that what he said?’
Nozomi chuckled. ‘No, he puts it much more elegantly than that. “Humanity is my canvas”, something like that.’
‘Why did you never try to escape?’
Nozomi shrugged. ‘And do what? Go where? My mother, father, you, I barely remember any of you. He’s been my guardian for more than five years. Who ever came looking for me?’
‘I did.’
Nozomi rolled her eyes and scoffed. ‘After five years. My dad never did.’
‘He couldn’t. He’s sick. But he’s kept all your letters. Every one.’
Nozomi blinked away tears. ‘He made me write them. I never wanted to. He was taunting my dad.’
‘Ken wants you back more than anything. He asked me to find you.’
Nozomi cocked her head. ‘Who was that man back at the theatre? Did you send him? The assassin? He was going to kill me.’
‘No. I know nothing about any assassin. If Crow dies I want it to be by my hand.’
‘He hates you, you know,’ Nozomi said. ‘He’s never forgiven you for what you did.’ She gave a dry laugh. ‘I don’t even know what it is you did, but he hates you for it.’
‘I stopped him.’
‘That would do it.’
‘We have to kill him. You and me.’
‘I don’t know if I can.’
Jun stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’
Nozomi shrugged. She touched her forehead where the gun had left a large bloody gash. ‘Your voice doesn’t make me hate you anymore,’ she said, ‘but when I look at you I still feel the urge to turn you over to him. It’s like an itch. I don’t know why. He looked after me, I suppose. He stole me, and living with him was always strange, but he never mistreated me.’
‘Why didn’t he use you as one of his experiments?’
Nozomi reached out a hand and flexed the fingers in front of Jun’s face. Lumps of metal bulged out through the skin.
‘He did,’ she said.
Jun grabbed her shoulders and pulled her towards him. ‘Use it!’ he hissed. ‘Use it against him!’
As she stared at him he wondered if she would agree, but she just held his gaze for a few seconds before turning away. ‘We have to go,’ she said. ‘They’ll catch up with us eventually.’
They headed on, following the corridor until it came to an unlocked door that opened on to a descending set of stairs.
‘What’s he doing here?’ Jun asked as they walked. ‘I saw stuff all over the ceiling.’
‘He never tells me anything,’ she said. ‘He talks about a performance, some kind of artistic project, but he always talks about that kind of stuff. It’s difficult to figure him out. I know that he has no care for suffering. It doesn’t matter what pain people go through. They’re just his tools.’
‘And you helped him?’
Nozomi shrugged. ‘He’s more dangerous than the police. I do what he tells me to do.’
Jun pushed through another door into a larger basement room and stopped. ‘Huh? What the fuck is this?’
Nozomi bumped into him from behind. One hand gripped Jun’s arm and gave it a light squeeze. ‘I think we just found the players.’
At least twenty people were squeezed into the room, sitting on low benches in rows of four or five. They looked like a pick n mix box of humanity’s bizarre, wizards and strongmen and dwarves and princesses, all shackled around the arms and wrists, wires linking their body parts together like—
‘Puppets,’ Jun whispered. ‘They’re like human puppets.’
‘For the show of the century,’ came a reedy voice from behind them that chilled Jun’s blood as he spun around, only to glimpse something heavy swinging towards his face. ‘And now we have our leads.’
Jun’s head hit the ground hard. He tried to shout for Nozomi but his mouth wouldn’t move. Consciousness drifted away as fingers, sharp like a crow’s talons, began to pull him into the darkness.
36
The circus of machinations
It was never the Grey Man’s policy to interfere with Galo’s assignments, particularly when they took his protégé to warmer climates where he was less comfortable, but this man Kurou was an intriguing character, if Galo’s reports were correct.
A scientist with a hatred for humankind. They could almost be brethren.
Minus the scientist part.
The Grey Man closed his eyes and concentrated, searching for the thread that would lead him to Galo. His strength had weakened over the years, but his protégé’s thread still shone gold where all others were fraying or broken.
My son, are you safe?
Galo was in Barcelona, a magnificent city the Grey Man had never previously had wont to visit. He had seen pictures, and admired what he saw, in the same way he admired everything humanity had created. He admired its intricacy, its evolution, and its delicacy. How easily shattered anything built of man could be. And how easily restored.
Galo’s thread had gone silent. His protégé was in trouble.
The Grey Man picked up the phone and chartered a flight out of Moscow to land on a small private airstrip just north of Barcelona.
Six hours.
In six hours he could be by Galo’s side.
Galo was unstoppable when he chose to be, but that extra thread of humanity that the Grey Man lacked caused him to make the occasional mistake. His disobedience in leaving Ken Okamoto alive had been noted, but he was still loyal to the cause as always. What could have happened to him?
Switching on the television, an archaic contraption that the Grey Man hated, he flicked over onto an international news channel and watched reports of Barcelona struggling beneath vicious rioting, native Catalans demanding their independence. It was a conflict that had threatened to boil over for some time.
The single murder of a tourist couldn’t have done it. There must have been more.
The Grey Man opened an old computer laptop and called up the internet, frowning at the speed of the thing. He disliked computers as much as he did the television, and would gladly occupy a world with neither.
He read through a couple of news reports about recent hate crimes in the city, about deliberate attempts to incite violence. He then did a search for the original articles published on various forum sites, blogs, and news websites.
Reading as an objective outsider, they didn’t seem real. They were too contrived, too obviously planted to be genuine. The languag
e was riling, accusatory, designed to stir people’s passions, to make them take to the streets.
It was the kind of manipulation that would make any politician proud.
Six hours.
In six hours he would know what was going on.
#
‘Where did they go?’
Jorge rubbed his head and turned his ear away from the door. ‘Sagrada Familia.’
‘Is it far?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Not with car or bike. Walking, one hour.’
Jennie glanced at the makeshift bandage wrapped over her shoulder, holding her right arm in a sling. She had been lucky, the bullet passing through muscle, but missing any major arteries. The pain was intense and she’d lost plenty of blood, but tightly wrapped in strips of material torn from old theatre costumes she could still move around.
‘There’s no way I can do that.’
Nozomi had left the key half turned in the lock. Jorge had been trying to dislodge it so he could pick the lock, but so far his efforts had proved fruitless. Now that the room beyond the door had gone silent, Nozomi and Jun apparently gone, he started to punch and kick the door as if he could knock it down by sheer willpower.
It didn’t budge.
‘We have to help Jun,’ Jennie said. ‘Nozomi, she went crazy when she saw him. She might kill him.’
Jorge nodded. ‘Like him,’ he said, nodding to the side as if to indicate the absent Jun. ‘Magic.’
‘Crow.’
‘Crow is magic, yes?’
Jennie shrugged. ‘He’s a madman, that’s for sure, but I guess magician wouldn’t be far off the mark.’
‘We need magic. Fire for fire, magic for magic.’