“Damn it!” Jubilee’s got her weapon aimed at them, and I can see her focus flicking with each little twitch of the gun barrel. She doesn’t know where to aim, much less where to shoot. These are innocents. No different from Kumiko and her soldiers on Avon, broken by the invasion of their minds. One of the figures helping to pin Chuck down is tiny—a child.
The moment seems to stretch into an eternity; we should be running. We should leave Chuck to his fate, let his choice to hide play out, continue our attempts to reach Dr. Rao. But all of us can hear him screaming for someone named Alisha—his wife, no doubt. I can’t tell if he’s calling out to her because he’s thinking of her, in these last moments, or if he’s screaming her name because she’s one of his assailants.
I’m holding onto Sofia so tightly I have to be hurting her, but she says nothing, her body shaking where she’s pressed against me.
Tarver breaks first, taking one step down the alley, swearing. But before he can move any further, the screaming stops. My heart lurches in the sudden silence, broken by five sets of panicked breathing. He’s dead—they killed him. They killed him.
But then the husks withdraw, straightening, coming to their feet. And so does Chuck. For the briefest second, we all stand there, confused. Then Chuck turns his head, gaze finding us—his dark, empty-eyed gaze.
I feel Sofia take a shaking breath. “Time to go,” she whispers.
We run.
Once, long ago, we could have spoken to them, these lonely survivors on this ghost of a world. But we are so weak now, and can do little more than watch. We see them as they cannot, will not, see each other—we see his heart in the way he looks at her; we see her soul calling out for his in every touch. It would be so easy if they could only see inside each other as we can.
And yet, there is beauty in the way they find each other: slowly, in a fragile dance of sidelong glances and accidental touches. To see them come together, souls binding without knowing each other as we do, without being certain of what the other’s heart holds, is to learn something new…
Faith.
THE DRY, ACRID AIR TEARS in and out of my lungs like a saw, the chemicals lingering from the Daedalus crash singeing the inside of my nose, my throat. I concentrate on the rhythm as my feet pound after the others, trying not to gasp aloud—if we can run far enough, fast enough, quietly enough, maybe we can leave the surging tide of husks behind us. Maybe we can sink back into silence and stealth again.
My eyes water with the effort, a new kind of panic starting to rise as the others get farther and farther ahead of me and Gideon—oh God, don’t leave us behind—until I realize Gideon’s keeping pace with me on purpose. He runs faster than I do, he should be ahead of me, he should be safe inside the range of Tarver’s and Flynn’s shields. And suddenly the litany in my head turns inside out. You idiot—just GO.
But then Jubilee and Tarver are spreading out, Tarver heading for one side of the street on the next block, and Jubilee for the other. My eyes catch one of them—I’m not even sure which—lifting an arm in signal. Then Tarver’s there as we reach them, ushering us to the side to follow Jubilee and Flynn down a side street.
“This way.” His words are short, clipped, precise and efficient. “Fewer husks—narrower streets.”
I risk a glance behind me as I skid to turn the corner following the others, and my heart sinks. The husks might be slow to react, might shuffle along as they search for targets—but once given a task, they can move as quickly as any of us. There are at least a hundred of them, only a few meters back. If they catch us and rip the shields from Flynn and Tarver, or drag us beyond their reach, we’ll have no protection left against the mental net the whisper’s casting over the city. I’d rather they tear us apart where we stand, than become one of those things.
My breath rushes out in a sob, and I stumble—Gideon’s hand grabs at my arm, and together we lurch to our feet and take off, Tarver bringing up the rear behind us.
The streets spin dizzyingly around us as we sprint through the maze of rubble and sinkholes. The pavement starts to crumble beneath me at one point and I have to jump for the far side—I don’t have time to look back, but I can hear a distant crash a few seconds later as the debris from street level drops down, down into the mid-city below, to shatter. We turn one corner, then another, then another—then turn back again, hitting a dead end, losing valuable seconds. The street funnels in, narrowed by the debris on either side. Then, abruptly, ahead of us is a wall of stones and twisted metal supports, part of a nearby skyscraper that’s sunken and tumbled into the street. My feet pause only for a moment before I take off again, this time dragging Gideon behind me as we move, start climbing the mountain of rubble.
Our hands and feet scrabble against the loose detritus, and my mind seizes wildly on a memory. Keep your body close to the wall. Don’t look down. I’m right behind you. All the little things Gideon called as I scaled the sheer wall of the elevator shaft in LaRoux Industries, what feels like years ago.
What I wouldn’t give to be back in that elevator shaft.
We’re not moving fast enough—though the pile of rubble isn’t that steep, it’s impossible to tell what’s solid and what’ll give way as soon as we grab it. And the husks are closing in.
Tarver turns, throwing himself back against the rubble and bringing his gun around to train on the things now starting to climb up through the broken building toward us. “Keep moving!” he shouts, his words punctuated by the squeal of the military-grade Gleidel. A bolt rips through the fleshy part of an arm, making the husk reel back and drop. Another shot, and another—two more go down, but the first one’s already moving again, resuming the climb, barely even slowed by the wound on his arm that’s now bleeding freely.
Pain doesn’t stop them—and none of us, not me, not Gideon, not Tarver or Jubilee or Flynn—none of us would be able to shoot to kill an innocent. Because that’s what the husks are: real people, with real lives, their brains and bodies hijacked.
Jubilee joins Tarver, pausing in her climb to draw her own weapon again, gasping to catch her breath as she fires once, twice; they’re barely making a dent in the mob surging up after us. I reach for the edge of a boulder-size hunk of cement—the bigger pieces usually move less—only to feel it shift and start to shudder toward me. I shriek and lurch to the side as it goes rolling down the slope, crashing into one of the husks and sending it sprawling.
I glance over at Gideon, whose eyes meet mine—and then we’re both reaching for whatever pieces of rubble we can find, hurling them down the slope at the mob, the sounds of shattering cement mingling with the shrieking of weapons fire. Flynn scrambles sideways so his concrete missiles won’t hit us, and joins the fight.
Then Gideon’s voice cracks in a shout, and I see him go skidding down the slope. I dive after him, grabbing at one of his arms just as my eyes pick out the hand wrapped around his ankle; a hand belonging to an old woman, her face horrifyingly serene as her thin, bony fingers dig into Gideon’s skin hard enough to turn it white. I give a wordless cry, wrapping both hands around Gideon’s and bracing my feet against a steel girder, as Gideon flails out with his other leg, trying to kick her off. Tarver’s there a breath later, unhesitatingly letting his gun drop and skitter away down the slope as he uses both hands to grab for Gideon’s other arm, helping me pull him out of the husk’s grasp, scrambling just inches ahead of the mob.