Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (36 page)

Every nerve screaming, my heart pounding as I thought about him being out there somewhere, silent and floating, driven by the power of his mind, I forced myself to stay down, listening. My HUD, still bright and clear, dialed up my hearing suddenly, a minor blessing as my old rotting augments suddenly worked as intended for a change. Above the hiss and spit of ambient nothing, I heard him—a quick scrape, the fluttering noise of something moving through the air. My hand was tight and white on the butt of my gun. I counted in my head, using instinct to time him—and sat up suddenly, back complaining, raising the gun, as he was still ten feet away, and firing twice.

In midair, Orel veered and spun awkwardly, lost balance, and tumbled backward, skidding into the loose ground like an undetonated shell. He bounced once, twice, and then sailed over the slight lip and into the elevator shaft like something had yanked at it from below.

I sat there, gasping, the cold air burning my throat as it went down. I closed my eyes and dropped the clip, fumbling with a shaking hand for a fresh one and slamming it into place. As I pulled the slide, I felt a hint of an invisible touch, and then a giant iron fist made of nothing at all grabbed me and yanked, and the elevator shaft came at me like it had met me before and had a grudge.

SIT ON THIS ROCK FOREVER NO
W PLAYING WITH OUR BONES

I banged up against the side of the shaft and pinged off it, slamming into the other side and repeating the process twice more, my teeth jumping in my head each time,my HUD dimming and brightening up like a loose wire was being knocked back into place. The air rushed by me with a sizzling noise, like hungry static eating me alive.

I shut my eyes and stretched out my arms, letting my gun drop away. The ladder rungs slapped into my left hand, and I flexed it, my fingers slipping through three, ten, fifteen rungs before I got some purchase. I clamped my hand as hard as I could, and with a searing, tearing pain my arm was dislocated and I slammed into the wall like I’d been fired from a cannon at short distance, smashing my nose on the ladder as an extra kiss from the cosmos. My HUD flickered and was gone again, giving me a split-second of red across the board before fading away completely.

As fresh sweat popped up all over me, I thought,
Well, shit, this feels like just about the right level of fucking nightmare for my jobs.
If Remy were alive—or Glee—I could have told them that nothing ever went as planned, and you had better expect to be hanging from an access ladder at least once.

Thinking of Remy and Gleason, I gritted my remaining aching teeth and sucked in the dank, black air. My face was hot and swollen, slick with blood and sweat. Anger bloomed in the pit of my stomach, a sour infection—everything had been swept into the past and there was not a fucking thing I could do to change any of it, and I wanted to just tear down the whole fucking shaft, pull it down with me and bury me and Orel forever. With effort, I moved my right arm, still feeling weak and numb. Gritting my teeth against the strange, numb pain—like pain from my future, reverberating backward along time—that spiked down from my shoulder and into the rest of my body, I swallowed blood and felt around my pocket until I found the thin little grenades Grisha had provided us. I pulled two free and toggled them active awkwardly, my fingers feeling thick and stiff. I counted to three in my head and let them drop, grabbing onto the ladder with both arms and hooking one elbow into the rungs.

I counted to three again in weird, cold silence, just my own wet, ragged breathing and the creak of the rusty ladder for company.

There was a silent, bright flash below me, the whole bottom of the shaft lit up and outlined perfectly, kind of pretty. The ladder began trembling and I swung gently from side to side, sweating and breathing hard, concentrating on keeping my grip. When the blast of hot air smacked into me, it felt kind of good for a split-second and then turned into a searing agony, hotter and hotter as air rushed past me. I shut my eyes and clamped my mouth shut, unable to breathe through my nose as heat and air roared past me, pushing at me, making me regret just about every decision I’d ever made in my entire fucking life, each one wrapped up in the complex tapestry that had brought me to this fucking spot in the time-space continuum. I hated my past selves intensely as I felt my skin blistering, melting, and running off my face like wax.

With a faint, sudden popping noise, it was over and the air felt ice-cold again, just like that. My HUD came on bright as day as my vision began to dim and—

I was still falling, so I knew I’d been unconscious for only a split second. Then the floor came up to say hello; I ducked my head under my functioning arm at the last second and tried to twist myself around. I landed on my side and my teeth jumped in my mouth again, my gun biting into my side and leaving, from what I could tell, a permanent impression of an automatic in my skin. Scissoring my legs, I pushed myself up into a sitting position and slid my hand into my pocket, seeking a gun, my eyes everywhere, blind in the gloom. My augments, it appeared, had finally shit the bed for good.

I could see Orel pretty easily, though. He was on fire.

His clothes had burned away, leaving just the sickly white skin of your standard Monk chassis. It burned with a blue-orange flame that licked and caressed him, his whole body and his face—eyes, nose, mouth—outlined in flames, everything else perfect shadows. I stared for a second. I remembered I’d dropped my gun on the way down, and I thrashed around the scorched, debris-littered floor feverishly trying to locate it, until I realized
I
was on fire too—at least my coat was. The yellowish flames licked at me lazily, like they had nothing better to do, jumping and creeping along the synthetic fibers.

The hallway was charred and filled with thick, black smoke. Patches of fire clung to the walls, everything burned down to the clean metal. I looked at Orel’s fiery outline as I backed away on my ass, sweeping my hands around me as my legs pushed me along. My hand miraculously found the butt of my gun, and I grasped it weakly, unable to close my fist very well or very firmly. I wondered if my hair was on fire, and I decided I didn’t need to check. I’d know soon enough.

Orel stood with his hands in front of him curled into fists, his elbows bent. The Psionic fist slammed into me without warning and knocked me backward, my finger spasming and sending a bullet into the air as I traveled. I hit the wall of the elevator shaft and was pinned there as if someone was holding a thick log against my chest—my arms and legs dangled free.

I stared at Orel’s silent, burning outline. My hand tightened as best it could on the butt of my gun; my other arm dangled numb and useless at my side, the arm slightly longer than it should be as it hung free from the socket. Anger filled me up and spilled over into my blood, my heart pounding its crazy, off-beat rhythm in my chest, all the pain suddenly burned away. Orel had fucked me a million times over, pushing me around like a piece on a board—I’d thought I was on the cosmos’s Rail all these years, trapped on a path, but it had been
Orel
’s rail. Remy’s death was on Orel’s hands. Glee’s death. Kev Gatz, Rose Harper, Krajian, millions of fucking people in the Plague—all because Orel had pushed me onto the board, pointed my toes in a direction, and then awaited results.

I forced the hot, acrid air into myself, took it in deep, and closed my eyes, seeking the imaginary glass shield I’d used to keep the voices at bay. I forced calm into myself like caulk, pushing the rage and fear aside, filling myself with beige numbness.
Patience
, I thought. It was the lesson Canny had taught me. For years he’d been teaching me. Patience. Wait for your moment and don’t move until it comes.

Orel took a stiff, unnatural step toward me, his hands skeletal, all the fake skin burned away, leaving the impervious alloy bones beneath.

I relaxed my grip on the gun. I had use of my arm; he didn’t have me wrapped up tight. Hard enough to keep his body upright and moving while he did other things, hard to multitask when you’d just been blown up and were on fire. Kev Gatz had had a lifetime to get to know his Push and hadn’t figured it out beforied; Orel had had just a few years.

I stayed limp. Anger bubbled over the edges of my imposed calm.

“I hope you enjoy the fucking
graveyard
, motherfucker,” I rasped. I had to shout or twitch, so I shouted. “You got your Monk body. You got it without anyone pulling your strings, and you got your fucking God Augment. You get to sit on this rock forever now, playing with our bones. Well fucking played. You are a
fucking genius
.”

Silently, the burning Monk stepped toward me, like it was dragging itself behind itself, the heavy alloys of the Monk chassis reluctant. The pressure on me increased, pushing me into the hot wall, crushing, making it almost impossible to breathe. A yellow pulse started filling my vision in time with my off-kilter heartbeat.

He took another step; he was only about eight or nine feet away. Able to just bend my elbow, I brought the gun up in one quick, jerking motion and squeezed the trigger once.

He had to choose which Push to keep up—he wasn’t experienced with it to begin with, and now had the strain of operating his entire physical being with his mind and using it on me. Instinct made him dive to one side, landing on the bubbling floor awkwardly; the invisible log disappeared from my chest. I dropped to the floor, staggering once and then launching myself forward, sprinting, my dislocated arm flopping at my side. I had to keep moving, keep coming at him and not let him concentrate.

The smoke made it hard to see, my eyes stinging and blurring, but the flaming outline of Orel as he rolled on the floor was clear enough, and I pushed myself at him, giving it everything I had. Jumping for it, I sailed down and landed on his back, fire leaping up around me for a second and then snuffing out. I leaned forward and snaked my arm around his neck, my gun still clutched loosely in my buzzing hand.

He tried to snatch me away with his telekinesis, my legs snapping up into the air, pain shooting through my body, but I hung onto him, my arm feeling weak and sore. I hung on with everything I had as he whipped me this way and that, trying to peel me off. When my arm felt tired and loose, sweat dripping from my face, I thought,
Shit, he’s going to beat me. He’s going to shake me loose and throw me against the fucking walls until I’m dead
, and I hated him. I realized, suddenly, that I’d never really hated anything before. I’d despised people, I’d
killed
people, but I’d never hated anyone until this exact moment, standing in the ruined guts of Chengara with a
thing
responsible for every bad moment of the past few years.

I pushed my legs down around his sides and squeezed while I loosed my arm a little, enough to get some play as I tried to angle the gun in toward his face, into his mechanical jaw.

He suddenly went limp. A second later, we both shot into the air and slammed into the charred wall, me pinned between it and the Monk, then bouncing off, spinning around, and slamming into the opposite side. Something stabbed into my shoulder, then sliced down toward the middle of my back—

“Motherfucker!”

—as we were scraped away and spun so I was upside down, then smashed down onto e floor. Wet pain soaked into my clothes. I shut my eyes and pictured Remy on the soldier’s back, hanging on no matter what and certain,
certain
I was about to free us, to take him off that truck and save him. Fucking certain.

With a grunt I moved my arm and jammed the gun’s barrel into the hollow where his cheek had once been, now burned away to the bare gray skeleton. The angle was hard to judge, but I immediately knew there was a chance I’d shoot myself as well if the bullet passed through. I hesitated. I thought of Grisha. I heard him:
Your winning or losing determines whether the entire human race withers on the vine.
I must be sure you understand that you
must
take him alive.

I pictured Mickey’s face on the hover, leaving me behind in this exact spot. Mickey always had a deal. Mickey always had connections, always had a plan, a fallback position. I thought of Remy. I thought of him watching me turn and put a gun on him. The cold, numb feeling from my arm seemed to spread rapidly, pumped through my body by my stuttering heart, settling in and removing all the fire, the pain, and leaving behind just an empty certainty.

I thought,

Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds

and pulled the trigger.

EPILOGUE

I STARED AT THE HEAD. THE HEAD
STARED BACK.

My steps echoed off the buildings as I walked down the cobblestone streets, twisting this way and that, barely wide enough for two people—if there was anyone else around—to pass. The buildings on each side were three or four stories high and cut off the sun, making everything dark and chilled, and there were occasional tin roofs stretched between the sides, cutting you off from the sky completely.

Toledo was deserted.

It was in good shape, though. It didn’t look like the city had taken any bombings or serious tank actions during the civil war. None of the blocks I’d walked past had sported empty lots filled with rubble, and the streets weren’t chewed up and churned into muddy pits. Mainly what I noticed was the lack of bodies; Toledo looked neat as a pin, as if everyone had just packed up their necessities and bugged out one evening, walking slowly and chatting, remarking on the weather.

I paused under another one of those simple roofs stretching a few feet over me. Vines grew on it, twisting under and around themselves, creating a canopy of green with purplish flowers. I stared at it. My back ached, tight and swollen, and my shoulders throbbed under my rough shirt. I stared at the canopy for a long time, swaying there on my feet, thinking about nothing. It had been months, but I was still not used to the absence of my HUD; there wasn’t even the flickering shadow of it that I’d lived with from time to time. It appeared to be permanently shut down.