I know that’s a lie.
Yong cries out. His cry becomes a squeal, because he’s not Yong, he’s a pig—the pig I killed in the Garden.
“Look what you’ve done, Em,” the pig says.
Blood sprays from its slashed throat, a crimson gusher that coats the green grass.
“But I had to,” I say. “You were in pain.”
The pig’s head tilts back, the cut I made widening until the head comes off and tumbles across a nighttime jungle floor. It rolls to a stop—now it’s a Grownup’s coal-black head wearing the metal and glass mask they use to breathe Omeyocan’s air.
“Look what you’ve done,” Old Visca says.
I want to turn away. I can’t.
“You were going to shoot my friend,” I say. “You were going to murder Barkah. I had to kill you, I had no choice!”
The head is a head one second, a huge Grownup the next. Coal-black skin is cratered, cracked and smoking, because this thing was ripped to shreds and now has been put back together.
“There is always a choice,” Old Bishop says. “Look what you’ve done!”
His words are thunder, a concussion that echoes through the city, bounces off ancient stone walls.
The fissures in his body flare with white fire, and once again he is torn to pieces, but each piece moves as if it is a living animal, grows arms and legs and vibrating blurd wings, crawls and scurries and flies back together in a self-assembling puzzle of gore that becomes a Springer…
“You murdered me,” it says. “Look what you’ve done.”
It’s the one I shot in the battle with the Belligerents. When I killed it, I didn’t think I saw details, but I was wrong—I would recognize this being anywhere.
“Look what you’ve done,” it says again.
“I had to!” I’m crying. I never cry. My voice is the voice of a weakling, someone who begs. “I’m so sorry, I had to.”
The Springer’s two-fingered hands slide to its belly, grab the spear sticking out of it. Blue blood sprays out, mixing with the ankle-deep red dust-slush at its feet.
“Look what you’ve done to me, Em.”
Now it is Ponalla, the Springer I killed in the jungle.
“The first Springer you killed,” Ponalla says. “There were more. Look what you’ve done to us.”
Ponalla stands in a field of carnage. Blood rain pours down. All around me are the twisted, ravaged bodies of Springers and humans, shattered remains of ruined spiders. Smoke and fire and flesh and bone.
“Your fault,” Ponalla says. “You could have stopped all of it, if you were stronger.”
“Aramovsky did this, not me!”
My words come out as cracked little things, as worthless and ineffective as my leadership.
Leadership. The spear in Ponalla’s belly…it’s mine. I need it to stop this nightmare.
I grab the spear shaft, but it’s not a spear anymore. It’s the handle of a knife, thick with jewels and slick with blood.
Red blood.
A knife buried in yet another belly, the belly of a boy wearing black coveralls.
No.
No, I can’t take this, I will go insane and I will never wake up I will never wake up I don’t want to see this I don’t want to remember!
“Look what you’ve done,” Kevin O’Malley says.
The stone walls shake around us, the stone floor trembles beneath. His head is in my lap. He smiles up at me with pure love, which makes it even worse. I killed him, but he was still in there.
“Look what you’ve done to me, Em.”
I want to tell him I love him, that I will always love him and that I’m so sorry, that I didn’t know he was still in there, but I suddenly can’t even hear my own words. Everything is a roar. The world shudders around us.
His hands reach up, grip my shoulders.
“Wake up, Em,” O’Malley says. “Wake up.”
His fingers curl in, squeeze hard enough to hurt. He doesn’t know his own strength.
Just like Bishop.
“Wake up.”
O’Malley shakes me. The world roars louder, and then he vanishes into the darkness of a fading dream.
“Em, wake up!”
My eyes snap open. Bishop, hovering over me, shaking me, fingertips digging into my soft flesh like iron claws. He lets go but the shaking doesn’t stop.
A long, low, droning howl, rising and falling, echoing off every building. Borjigin’s emergency warning siren.
Another sound, an explosion, its roar so loud I wince, so loud it hurts, makes my inner ear flutter like something is kicking it.
“We’re under attack,” Bishop says, his voice level and spooky-calm. “Move.”
I’ve fallen off the couch. The floor trembles beneath me. Earthquake? But he said we’re under attack….
The tremble subsides. I stand. My house is falling apart. The ceiling leaks streams of dust. Deep cracks line my once-smooth walls, like lightning frozen in stone.
Bishop runs to the stairs, but I don’t follow him. I have to see what’s happening. I sprint to our east balcony and look out.
Uchmal is ablaze.
A dozen fires burn high, illuminating clouds of billowing smoke and dust. Fire makes shadows dance, as if the surrounding buildings are lit up from a dozen tiny suns that have settled on our streets. A ten-layer ziggurat a few blocks down has crumbled like it was stomped on by a giant boot, the peak smashed in, one tiered edge standing thin and tall like a broken brown tooth. The vines that covered the ziggurat are ablaze, leaves burning bright, heat making the long stems twist as if the fresh ruin is carpeted in a blanket of writhing fire-snakes.
We’re under attack? The Springers don’t have weapons that can do this…do they?
Up above, blazing lights…long-tailed comets scorch the night sky, plummeting down to strike my city.
I don’t know what I’m seeing, exactly, but the source of this destruction becomes suddenly obvious—the alien ship is bombarding us.
One of those comets streaks directly toward me, louder than all the others, a thunder-scream that freezes me where I stand. The fireball smashes into a ziggurat across the street, erupts in an explosion that shuts my eyes, that throws my arm in front of my face before the boiling breath of an angry giant blows me backward. I slam into a table, knocking it over as I spill across the stone floor.
Searing pain on my left shoulder. I slap at it with my right hand even as I lurch to my feet, off-balance. Flames flare: the table is ablaze. Bits of the ceiling break free and drop down. My paintings and tapestries wriggle with fire. The floor trembles so fiercely I can barely stay on my feet.
I dash to my bedroom, jam my feet into boots.
Bishop rushes in, hunched over against the crumbling stone ceiling, arm near his face to protect against the heat and flame.
“Em, come on!”
I follow him through our burning house. Down stone stairs: one flight, then another, then another.
We are out on the street. My city burns. Flames reach up from craters and the husks of smashed buildings. I hear screams, both human and Springer, echoing through the night. The warning siren wails. Above us, tongues of fire streak down to hammer the ground.
Bishop points eastward.
“The Observatory, it’s not being attacked.”
I see that he’s right. The mammoth structure rises up, blocking out the stars, yet it is free of flame. Surely that won’t last. Our attackers are raining fire down all around us—they can’t possibly miss the biggest building on this planet.
“We need to run for the jungle,” I say. “The city’s being destroyed!”
“Stick to your emergency plan.” Bishop’s voice is calm and resonant. “The Observatory is big enough that it can probably survive the impacts.”
My plan was to protect us against a Springer attack, not a barrage from space. Most of my people live in the Observatory, so they’ll already be there. Those that don’t are trained to head for it at the first s
ound of the siren.
But with comets blazing down, with buildings collapsing, I think of the Observatory crumbling, of being buried beneath a mountain of stone. My breath seizes up. I will not die in the dark, I will not. The jungle, the open spaces, that’s where we need to be.
I see two people lurch out of a crumbling building. Young circle-stars. Kai Brown, that’s his name, and the girl is Ines Darzi. Brown wears black coveralls, while Darzi—one of D’souza’s Demons—is still decked out in the fancy scarves she wore at the party. They stop, kneel by an unconscious girl sprawled out on the rubble.
The girl is hurt. There will be more wounded. In the Observatory’s hospital, Kenzie can help them. And if we run to the jungle, we have no central rallying point. My people will be spread out, disorganized…defenseless.
We will stick to the plan.
I point to the kids. “Let’s help them.”
Bishop is much faster than I am. He reaches the wounded girl before I’m even halfway there, scoops her up and throws her over his shoulder.
Darzi’s face is badly burned, but her eyes are clear and she is not afraid. A silver bracelet is on her right arm, long point aimed at the ground. The bracelet’s crystal glows white, ready to unleash its deadly energy. Brown hovers near, a Springer-made hatchet in his hand.
“Stay with me,” I tell them, and we run down the wide Yong Boulevard toward the towering Observatory.
Others join us in our mad rush, stumbling out of buildings or crawling from the rubble. One moment there are the five of us, the next seven, the next ten. Still the comets streak down like swords of flame, punishing our city.
A roar far louder than the others, that thunder-scream telling me a comet is plummeting toward us.
“Down,” Bishop screams, and we throw ourselves to the flat stones as a fireball punches into the street not a hundred strides ahead of us. Wind-driven flame washes over our backs. Something smashes into my chin. Rubble showers down around me, hammers into me.
The world goes silent.
For a moment, I can’t hear anything. Then, a high-pitched ringing. Sounds fade back in: the heaving roar of tall flames, the crack and crumble of collapsing stone, the coughing and cries of my people.
We are close to the Observatory, but not close enough.
A pillar of fire rises high into the night sky. Visca Spire is ablaze. A comet took a chunk out of it on the way down. The tower shudders, then something breaks in the middle—the top half tilts sideways, trailing a long arc of orange and red flame. It smashes across the width of Yong Boulevard in a cloud of smoke and ash and hot stone, completely blocking our path.
“Everyone, up,” Bishop screams. “Grab the wounded, we’ll go around!”
It should be me shouting to my people, leading them on, but I have no air in my lungs. Bishop will get us to safety.
I see a girl to my right, struggling to rise. Fancy rags smolder, dance with bits of fire. It’s Darzi. I throw myself on her, smothering the flames, then I grab her and pull her up.
“On your feet!”
She wobbles once, but I catch her, steady her, then she’s standing on her own power. Blood pours down her face. Her left arm hangs limply. She coughs, then moves to help someone else up.
I see a boy lying facedown across a pile of broken brick. I rush to him, boots slipping on the loose rubble. I fall twice before I reach him. At the back of his head is a knot of white, a tied headband—it’s Halim Horn.
I kneel and grab him, turn him over to scream at him to get up, to run…
…but he will never do either of those things, not ever again.
Halim’s lower jaw is gone, the place where it once was now a void of ragged red flesh and broken bone. His throat, too, is missing—I can see the bones of his neck. His head…it’s barely attached to his body.
Dead eyes stare out.
Eyes that look exactly like they did in the Observatory: brown, wide, still wet, but now lifeless, hollow, empty.
A glob of red spreads across his white headband.
A hand, pulling at my coveralls. Darzi, screaming at me to move, screaming at me just the way I screamed at her a few moments ago.
I distantly hear another crushing impact, feel the faint caress of billowing heat.
Halim is gone. The boy who didn’t want to fight, who wanted to be a scientist, now he is nothing but meat. His dreams will forever go unfulfilled.
I will find who did this…I will find them and I will slaughter them.
I stand. Fire all around us. Our world is ablaze. Flame rises up from ziggurats, dances in the streets, whips and whirs with the blowing wind. We have to move, but to where?
Bishop runs to my side. He still has the girl over his right shoulder, and now a boy over his left. The two limp bodies look like toys.
“Em, help me find a safe way through the fire.”
Again that dauntless calm. Bishop is iron, cold and hard. His steadiness soothes my fear and rage.
The fires are closing in. Heat bakes us, grows hotter by the second. I don’t see a way clear. Smoke sears my lungs, stings my eyes. We’ll be cooked alive.
A new noise, coming from the far side of the crumbled, burning spire that blocks the street. Through the shimmering heat, I see something approaching.
Something big.
I recognize the new noise: an engine.
The remnants of Visca Spire billow outward, broken bricks tumbling and flame-kissed stones spinning as the fire is pierced by a moving wall of metal.
Trailing flames from its strange front end, Big Pig thunders across the rubble. It slows suddenly—huge black tires squealing and sliding on broken stone—then shudders to a halt.
The driver’s door opens.
“Everyone, come on,” Victor screams at us. “Go go go!”
People rush for the truck. I push Darzi toward it, then grab at Brown, who is slow to rise. His leg is broken. I throw him over my own shoulders in a fireman’s carry, the way Bawden taught me to do.
Bishop is next to me, urging me on, his steps strong and sure despite his double-shouldered burden.
The heat hammers at us, tries to drain the life from our very bodies.
Then Victor is there, pulling Brown from my shoulders. Coughing madly, I stagger toward the back of the truck, no longer sure of what’s happening around me. Someone lifts me. Hands pull me up. I wipe tears from my stinging eyes. I’m in the truck’s big bed, which is full of dirt and people. Darzi, Brown, Bishop, people from my neighborhood, others Victor must have rescued along the way.
Zubiri is here, her white shirt filthy from the dirt and the smoke. She has a thick leather bag over her shoulder, and from it she pulls out clean white bandages. She ties off wounds, not with Smith’s delicate touch, but rather with an urgency born of desperation. She’s coughing hard, not even bothering to cover her mouth as she moves from wounded person to wounded person.
The truck lurches. We grab for the sides, for each other, for anything that will let us hold on as Victor turns it sharply.
I grip the top of the truck bed’s wall, pull myself up to look over. Fires all around. They aren’t spreading, though, and some are already dying out. The vines are damp from the rains. If they had been dry, Uchmal would be a sea of flame.
The truck hits something in the road, bounces over it roughly enough to make me lose my grip. I fall back to the dirt. All around me, the lurching ride makes people struggle to maintain their balance.
Zubiri crawls across the dirt toward me.
“Em, you’re cut,” she says. She pulls a white bandage from her bag and presses it to my jaw. “Hold this tight, keep the pressure on it.”
In a daze, I reach up to do what she says, then realize I’m already holding something in that hand. Something soft. In a distant, dreamy state, I look to see what it is.
A strip of bloodstained white cloth.
Halim’s headband, embroidered with the null-set symbol.
I feel the truck slow sharply, again hear
the screeching of tires. We stop. The heat is gone. Cool night air caresses me, soothes my scorched skin. The Observatory—it looms over us. If we can get inside, maybe we’ll survive to see the sun rise again.
People call to me. Hands gently pull me to my feet, then lower me to the ground. Someone slides under my arm, helps me walk.
There is no fire here.
The Observatory’s vines dance with shadows cast by the flames we’ve left behind.
The circle-crosses patch up our wounds until the attack stops. We don’t know if it will start up again, so those of us who can rush from the Observatory and into the nighttime streets.
Usually, I lead. Sometimes in violent situations, Bishop takes over. Now, it is neither of us—Borjigin tells everyone what to do.
He is on spiderback, messageboard in hand. While Kenzie tended the wounded, Borjigin was making a list of who is missing and where they live. He assigns people to dig, to carry water to workers, to call out for the missing by name, to use spiders and trucks to move rubble.
Most of the fires have already burned out. The city is made of stone and brick. What wood and cloth there is—furniture, doorframes, things like that—is already consumed.
Everywhere, the smell of smoke. Of scorched stone. And another scent I know all too well, one that I had hoped I would never know again: the smell of burned flesh.
A few of the Springers who live in Uchmal are here with us. The rest are digging madly in a nearby area, as that’s where most of them lived. As bad as my neighborhood looks, I’m told theirs is even worse.
I don’t see Maria anywhere. If she’s dead…
Borjigin assigns me to a crew with Farrar and a young gear named Milton Cathcart. Farrar swings a pickaxe to break up the stones of a collapsed entrance. Milton and I shovel away the broken chunks as fast as Farrar makes them. Milton works hard, but babbles the entire time, saying that the comet-missiles were probably big rocks “superheated” from punching through the atmosphere. He uses words like “potential energy” and “giga-jewels.” I don’t know what those things mean. I keep shoveling.
I hear a murmur of alarm, people shouting that we’re under attack again. A Springer war horn echoes through the city—and this one isn’t from our emergency system.