Chapter 102: Flight Path
The door swung half-shut at my back, grinding against the concrete.
Lena shot a glance back at me. Her eyes flickered around, narrowed.
I knew she was looking for Albie.
I shook my head. “We have to trust her.”
Lena’s nostrils flared. Her lips curled back, showing clenched teeth. Her shoulders tensed. She started to turn.
Donica cried out.
“Shit!” Lena shifted to raise her higher off the ground. “We got you.”
“You better,” Donica gasped.
Lena had one of Donica’s arms draped over her shoulder. Zhizhi supported the other arm. Donica staggered between them, only putting weight on one of her legs. Her other foot hung at a weird angle; I was pretty sure her ankle was broken. Bleeding, too, from the dark stain on jeans.
If there had been any doubt that the creature could hurt our physical bodies once we ran out of HP, consider it dispelled.
Not that I’d ever doubted.
I sprinted up to them and offered my shoulder, but Lena shook her head. “I said we got her. Watch our backs.”
“– you hear us now?” Erin’s voice came through my headset, still sped up past clarity, but at least comprehensible.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Miss Albie seemed to be winning handily, based on the feed we saw from her camera,” Erin said. “So please, concentrate on getting out of there. Donica, do you need first aid?”
Donica bit out, “I need to get away from this goddamn place.”
“Okay,” Erin and I murmured. We started at the same time but, with Erin sped up, she finished speaking the word a lot faster than I did. It left me feeling sluggish.
So did the pace we made with Donica suspended between Lena and Zhizhi.
Nonetheless, we moved.
The wall on our left, toward the warehouse, shuddered. Something slammed into the pressed board and the panel beside my head cracked.
“Cut right,” Miguel said.
No argument from us.
Turning at the next intersection meant leaving my and Donica’s tracks behind, but let’s be real here. None of us were paying attention to the floor, anyway. We had to hope the layout of the hallways would remain at least close enough to realistic that heading away from the warehouse took us closer to the room I called the vet’s office.
The rest of the expedition team staggered down the hallway. I backed my way after them, shooting glances to keep them in sight.
Now that I had a few seconds to think, I manifested Iron with Water, shifted it to mercury, let it drip into a sphere, then squashed it against one of the walls. I turned the resulting dome back into iron and switched to Air, leaving myself with a more compact shield I hoped would prove tougher and more maneuverable in the tight confines of the hallway.
Okay, what I really hoped was that I wouldn’t need it.
I wasn’t about to operate on that hope, though.
“Now left,” Miguel said in our ears.
Donica grunted as Lena and Zhizhi guided her that way. I followed the sound of their footsteps.
“I’m sorry we haven’t been able to coordinate better,” Erin said. “I tried to keep you posted of what we were observing, but time must’ve become too badly distorted in the warehouse.”
“Sorry, hell.” I shook my head. Pointless; now that we weren’t aiming our cameras at each other, my gestures conveyed nothing to the support team. “You’re doing a great job. Speaking of, how did Matt manage to come through so clearly back there?”
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“Played a sound file back at one-eighth speed,” he said. “Erin has ShakeProtocol making a whole soundboard of things we might need to tell you.”
“Good call,” I said. “Thanks for picking up on what was happening to us.”
“Once we get it built out completely,” Erin said, “we should at least be able to give you both cardinal and relative directions, all of the Third Eye substances we know, and whatever moment-to-moment instructions you think will be useful.”
Too late to help us this time, beyond the way they already had. If we got into another mess like this, though, it would give the support team the kind of almost real-time pause control over the situation I’d imagined at the start of the fight.
Of course, that relied on any of us being willing to risk another mess like this.
As we staggered through intersections and down halls and past doors, real and fake, and nothing sprang out to attack us, I allowed myself the luxury of long-term thinking.
Donica was hurt. Bad. A broken ankle, at least, plus whatever was causing her to bleed. The blow must have torn her skin, too. And that had just been the thrashing of a distortion I’d already pinned. I didn’t know if the creature had even still been trying to attack or if its last blow had just been a reflex action.
If Lena or I had run out of HP, or if the creature had managed to strike Zhizhi, that – or something much worse – could’ve been us.
If Albie hadn’t shown up to save us, it surely would’ve been.
I didn’t understand how the creature related to the elevator, but its presence seemed to emanate from it. Without Albie’s warning, we would’ve run straight into the lobby, straight into its grasp. With no warning, no preparation, would we have put up any fight at all?
Then there was the way Donica seemed to fall in midair when she tried to step toward Albie in the lobby. Moving into distorted space and time? Or some effect generated by the creature? Prepared or not, warned or not, we might have been disabled before so much as realizing we were under attack.
We couldn’t take this kind of risk again.
We couldn’t let anyone else do so.
We’d joked about death flags, we’d tried to gear ourselves up, but in the end, Matt had been right. The construction site was no place for the likes of us. Maybe we could approach Albie’s level someday –
But only if we were willing to keep playing Third Eye.
For the first time since I got a glimpse of its graphics, I didn’t know if I was.
A crash behind me shocked me out of my thoughts. I looked around wildly, but despite how loud it had sounded, nothing appeared in the hallway.
“What was that?” Lena shouted.
“Must’ve been back in the warehouse,” I said.
The sound of Lena’s footsteps slowed, but Donica said, “At least try to stay in step, would you?”
“I am,” Lena muttered.
I knew she wasn’t. She was thinking about going back for Albie.
In case she glanced back at me, I shook my head. “Listen. You hear that wind?”
A beat. Then, “Yeah.”
We all could. The rush of it had grown louder and louder, and whatever crash we’d heard must have broken more of the warehouse wall, giving us a fuller taste of the sound. More than I’d ever want to hear.
When I’d seen how many weapons Albie spun around herself, I called the Air she whipped around her a tornado of steel. Now, I thought she might have literally made a tornado inside the warehouse. I hadn’t heard the real thing in person, but if movies were any indication, this was what I imagined it sounding like – a roaring, pounding, oncoming-train din that shook me to my bones and seemed to grow louder with every heartbeat.
I thought the crashes continued, but all other noises were dwarfed by the sound of the wind.
“As long as we hear that,” I said, “we know Albie is just getting stronger. Right?”
Another hesitation. Then Lena sighed and said, “You’re right. I know. I’ll trust her.”
“I think I see the door,” Zhizhi shouted. “Your prints go right up to it!”
“Try it,” I said.
I heard her hand bang against the pressed board. “Dammit!”
“If you see the prints, it means we’re probably on the right track,” I said. “We tried a bunch of doors on this hall.”
“If you say so.” Her hand kept banging against the wall, and as we neared the halfway point of the hallway, she cried, “Yes!”
I turned to look as the door swung open under her hand.
She and Lena guided Donica through the doorway. Lena hung back so it didn’t swing shut until I reached it. I dashed forward and caught the door.
On the other side, I saw the familiar lines of the vet’s office. The counter with its former Glass barrier, the end table where I’d grabbed Wood and Plastic from the magazines, the fake doors to a back room and the outside –
And the windows.
They’d managed to acquire another coat of dust since the last time I saw them, and snow had blown in a high drift against their outsides. So much time had elapsed out there, I didn’t see so much as a hint of light from the sun over the mountains, somewhere far beyond the dust.
Suddenly, light, blindingly bright compared to the battery-powered lamps clipped to our chests and the lights from our phones and the fake fluorescence in which Third Eye bathed the halls of the construction site, lanced through the windows. I flinched away and covered my eyes.
Another crash.
Ahead of us.
My arm fell away and I stared, too spent to do more than waive my phone and my makeshift Iron shield in the direction of the sound.
I breathed again when I realized I hadn’t needed to do even that much.
Through Third Eye, I saw two Iron shapes, formed into something like giant crowbars. They’d crashed through the window at the far end of the room, spraying it with glass and chips of wood. They raked back and forth, clearing the window frame of stray shards.
Outside, silhouetted by the Yukon’s headlights, Erin and Matt directed their constructs downwards, then reformed them into a ramp that stretched over both sides of the window. Then they deselected the Iron with waves of their hands and rushed forward to help us lift Donica out.