Suddenly, the shooting stopped. Crouched behind his pillar, his head between his hands, Matt felt a wave of sudden panic flow through the psychic connection, then a surge of fury, then hysterical abject fear – then nothing. The connection went dark, all sensation fading from the back of Matt’s skull. His mind raced, sifting through the sensation. It didn’t feel like they’d pulled back. It felt like they’d gone dark.
Screw it, Matt swore, now or never. He leapt from behind the pillar, running as fast as possible, racing in an erratic zigzag for the other end of the building. No shots came. But though Matt’s chest swelled with a surge of excitement his relief was short‑lived, because the delay had cost him seconds, practically all his precious head start. As he rounded the corner he heard the invisible man shout, and Matt sprinted, desperate, up the stairs to the higher levels, around and around and around.
Only two left. Only two.
The sound of rapid gunfire shattered his concentration, bullets ricocheting off the stairs and walls, punching lines of concrete holes. Screw me screw me screw me – Matt darted to the right, feinted left, in and around another bare shell of a room, swinging Azleena’s bag back in front of him, pawing desperately for something, anything-
His hands closed around the stink pellets and he threw them on the ground, not even bothering to aim, just launching them behind him in the path his attackers would take. He shot round a corner, and a second later was rewarded with angry shouts, the sound of coughing. But bad smells would do nothing. Matt had bought himself a few seconds, max.
Think. Think! There, on the far corner of the building, abutting the jagged patchwork of unfinished floor, a blue tarpaulin fluttered over another pallet of bricks. Go, go! Matt sprinted over, skidding around the gap leading to open nothingness, heart hammering, lungs burning, tearing off the tarpaulin, wrenching it over the hole in the floor, slamming down bricks on every corner and then running, his hands fumbling, scrabbling in the bag for the decoy projector, which just this morning he'd let scan him to create a passing 3D likeness-
The false image sprung to life, showering Matt’s surroundings with refracted images of himself and light. Matt sprinted, device in hand, pelting down the length of the room then sliding on his heel and slapping the projector on the ground, facing towards the other end of the building and the tarp he’d just laid down. Footsteps pounded on the staircase below him and Matt barely had time to hit the ‘Play’ button, sending the intangible figure running, before his pursuers caught up.
With any sober consideration, through anything less than a pain and adrenaline‑soaked haze, the image wouldn’t have been convincing. The movement was too stiff, the footsteps too light, the colours and sway of hair and clothes disconnected to everything around it. But the soldiers who raced up the half‑built building stairwell drenched in sweat and thoughts of murder did not see the image through unfiltered eyes. They saw it through fog‑stained goggles, through burning muscles and churning rage and a million years of predator instincts tracking a prey’s rapid movement, all shapes and approximate sizes. Matt did not see the invisible man come first up the stairs but he heard his footsteps, heard him screaming and the deafening bang of bullets erupting from his rifle. He heard him swearing, saw his footprints in the dust as he sprinted towards the decoy, giving chase, enraged at his shots doing nothing, boots pounding closer and closer as Matt’s image crossed the tarpaulin, ran free across to the other side-
And then Matt saw the blue tarp give. He heard a scream, a thick, cracking thud as the thin plastic sheet pulled free of the meagre bricks and the ensnared shape of the invisible man plummeted, hurtling down the side of the building, his screams flailing rapidly into nothingness. And then, far below, there came a solid wet crunch.
One.
“DAMNIT!”
Matt spun and there, on the other end of the building stood the final soldier – a piston‑necked, barrel‑chested bear of a man, his ruddy face smeared with a shadow of pockmarks and stubble and pure, frozen fury in his eyes. His head spun from watching his companion fall towards the shimmering light of the hologram and Matt not three feet beside it. He snapped up his weapon. Matt dived.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-
Pain. Sudden, excruciating pain in his right arm, his bicep, but Matt tore it from his mind and refused to feel, his legs pounding on the concrete, hurtling around corners, hurtling upwards. Ever, ever upwards, blood streaming between his fingers, towards he knew not where, with only one man giving chase.
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But almost no more tricks.
*****
The Chimera rose, its spidery mutant body covered in tawney hair, its seven arms swinging lashes of fire, deafening sound erupting from all four of its split and bleeding lips. Yet as it cantered forward a shadow reared and above it the dragon roared, shining brilliant red, its claws as big as a man’s waist, and in an instant its jaws slammed around the creature and shattered every bone in its brittle body with a sickening, shrieking crunch.
The defenders cheered. Celeste whipped her head around, savaging the limp monstrosity like a dog shaking a rabbit, then pivoted, rearing on her back legs and slamming through lines of Deathless with her spiked wrecking ball of a tail. She flung the broken Chimera away, a bloody, shattered ragdoll, and bellowed so loud the ground trembled, a victorious, defiant roar.
“HOLD!” Giselle thundered, “HOLD!”
All around her, the Legion were winning. Bloodstained, panting but unbroken they stood, shouting incoherent war cries and unleashing wave after wave of hoarse, delirious power at the abominations that dared survive. All around the dead zone now, battlelines held drawn and unyielding, barricades of risen earth and foot‑thick ice and steel, shining forcefields and shields of fused car doors. All through the barriers, through opening port holes and closing gaps, projectiles and energy rocketed, flares of rifles, defiant shouts and screaming death. As a single-minded team, flanked by soldiers and civilians, the Legion tore through their enemies, slicing apart the Chimeras, pushing back the Deathless, the former dwindling in number, the latter blasted into crawling wrecks that no matter how quickly they repaired were never fast enough to get back on their feet.
“FIRE!” Giselle roared, and a part of her no longer knew what she was shouting, “FIRE!”
Celeste’s enormous ruby wings unfurled and she beat a thudding retreat up out of the line of fire, and with a barrage of filthy swear words the Acolytes around Giselle filled the no‑man’s land with a hail of power and weapon fire. The Deathless stumbled, collapsed, tumbling. The Chimeras roared.
“WITH ME!” the Legion’s leader cried, and though her lungs burned and her legs ached she once more vaulted over the barricades, two other speedsters falling in formation behind her, together racing, three crimson blurs, over to one of the last remaining Chimeras, fifteen‑foot round and covered in chitinous plates. The speedsters flew over and around it, shining knives finding every crack in the armour, every weak point, and in the space of a heartbeat they were running back, blood gushing out of the creature as it staggered onto the sidewalk, a water balloon pierced with a thousand pinpricks. The creature once more began to divide, replicating, but this time the defenders were ready, and bolts of lightning pummelled down from the skies.
Almost there. They almost had it. On the far side of the dead zone, hundreds of feet away, Giselle could see the golden light of Lady Dawn pushing inwards, so far inside the monochrome bubble the grey was almost wrapping back in around. But Jane was still there – still going. And like a slow-moving beacon carrying all their hopes, with every step the light advanced the field of grey grew smaller, the number of new abominations exposed less and less. All they had to do was hold. Just a little longer. A little more.
“FOR HUMANITY!” Giselle screamed, and all around her fists punched into the air, the earth shaking with mighty roars, “FOR THE LEGION! FOR THE DAWN!”
*****
Through the golden hurricane around her, the briefest gap where the gold washed against the grey, Jane saw it. The famous crossroads – the sign‑lit streets. Times Square, twisted into a patchwork of colourless aberration, all traffic within it stopped, its people stumbling, forfeited of their souls. And there, in the middle, the centre of the pulsing. The source of the energy radiating out like a thundering heartbeat, shuddering and remaking the world.
She had expected a person, someone kneeling and unleashing madness, or some child come fresh into their power and unintentionally releasing untold horror. But to her shock instead Jane saw two people, or what looked like two versions of the same person. Stumbling, the storm swallowing up the shout of their voices. Locked together, fighting. Killing one another, again and again.
They were both men in their early twenties, both Asian, both lean. One, dressed in the tattered remnants of a suit, staggered with strands of dark hair falling over jet-black eyes, screaming hoarse nothings, wild and delirious. The other, in a torn, filthy white jacket, shouted back at him, equally incoherent, his eyes not black but pure white, and suddenly Jane thought she could somehow hear their voices over the howl of the churning storm. Because they were the storm – whatever was happening to them, whatever was happening between them, their pain and chaos was exploding out, rippling through the fabric of reality in rhythmic, pulsing thuds. As Jane gritted her teeth, pushing desperately forward, she saw the black‑clad twin fall upon the body of the white one, gripping his shirt with both hands and slamming his head into the pavement. Yet the ivory‑eyed twin did not die. Instead, he shrieked words only God could understand and slammed his fist into the chin of his counterpart, hard enough to break wrist and bone, yet there was crack, no splintering, no blood.
In the eye of this surreal storm, two photonegative clones beat each other to never‑nearing death, oblivious to the destruction billowing around them.
Jane bent her knees, driven low by the force of the driving energies, and once more she threw back her chest and shouted, the power of Dawn roaring with her, the light bellowing its unyielding answer. Through the heart of the storm she bore down towards the Divines, advancing by inches, bearing the power of the sun.