by Bob Proehl
“You think there’s incoming?” Ji Yeon asks.
“What would you do if you saw a Gate breach in this building?” Carrie asks.
“Send everyone,” Ji Yeon admits.
“Four out of these five got their heads clear,” Carrie says, pointing to Nolan and his Bloom. “It’s only luck all four jumped sides when they got the choice. Half the Faction agents in New York are going to be fighting the other half to get here.”
“It’s going to be war again,” says Shen.
“I don’t think it will,” Carrie says.
“You weren’t here,” he says. “Our students—my students—died in the lobby. I made myself as big as I could until my bones strained under their own weight, and I couldn’t save them all.”
“Can you send the kids to their rooms?” Ji Yeon asks. “Put them on lockdown or something?”
“We tell them what’s coming,” Carrie says. “If they want to hide, they hide. If they want to fight, they fight.”
“They’re children,” Shen says. “It’s my job to keep them safe.”
“Nowhere’s safe today,” Clay says. He thinks about Rai and Dom. He sent them back to the house before he went into the megachurch, but the Faction agents in Chicago there haven’t had their heads cleared. They’re still puppets.
Shen walks slowly to his desk and picks up the phone. He dials three numbers, and speakers in the upper corners of the lobby hum to life. “Attention, students,” he says. His voice booms through the public address system but sounds broken and small. He takes a deep breath, but it’s evident he can’t go on. Carrie puts her hand over his and takes the phone.
“Students,” she says. “My name is Carrie Norris. I’m a graduate of the Bishop Academy, a long time ago. The school is under attack. The Black Rose Faction has been compromised. Some of them intend to hurt you, and they are on their way here. We can’t keep you safe. That sucks, but it’s true. You can lock your doors and hope for the best, or you can join us and fight. All we can give you now is a choice.”
Carrie closes her eyes and hangs up the phone.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go up.”
“I’m staying here,” Clay says. “My ability’s more practical for holding ground than taking it.”
“I was planning on having you with me,” Carrie says.
“You know I’m right,” Clay says.
“Of course you’re right,” she says. “I wish you were coming up, too.”
She puts her hand out, and, rolling his eyes, Clay drags her into a hug. He extends his ability around them so this second stretches out.
“I don’t understand what we’re doing here,” he says. “I can’t see the win.”
“We live through it; that’s the win,” Carrie says. “We get to go back to our people and stop doing this shit all the time.”
“You see you’ve got people to get back to now,” he says.
“I’ve got a whole future I’m thinking about,” Carrie says.
“Starts tomorrow,” he says. He brings time back up to speed, and Carrie, Ji Yeon, and Hayden take off toward the stairs. When they open the utility door, a flood of students spills out.
“What can we do?” asks a girl who must be younger than Rai. Luminescent energy swirls around her hands.
“Ask him,” Carrie says as she squeezes by them into the stairwell.
Clay looks around, hoping she’s talking about someone else, but everyone is looking at him.
“Okay,” he says. “We’re holding the door.”
As Clay assigns them positions and jobs according to ability and skill, he thinks about what Nolan said, how the fifth agent in their Bloom hadn’t been affected the way they were, how he went rabid when he realized they were no longer all on the same page. They’ll need to be ready for an army of Faction agents foaming at the mouth. If Glover is not just influencing but controlling all of them, he might push everyone’s rage buttons and point them at the school rather than coordinate and pilot hundreds of bodies. Clay stations fliers at the high windows of the room and rows of kids behind him on the revolving door, with Shen standing in front of them, big enough to block them all. If a wave of Faction decides to take down the whole wall, there’s nothing any of them can do.
It’s a relief when he sees them show up on Lexington, moving normally, not shambling like a zombie horde. The first few look like they’ve come from a fight. Somebody got shots in before they were taken out, Clay thinks. Sometimes that’s the best option you get.
“I’ve got visual,” he shouts. “Four I can see, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more. Everybody ready?”
His answer is silence. These kids are scared shitless. Their brave moment was walking out of their dorms when Carrie gave the call; everything past that is a consequence of that choice.
An agent spots him through the door, and the other three turn as one. Clay steps into a quadrant of the revolving door as the agents make a rush for the building. With a wider view of the street, he sees ten, eleven more approaching. The first agent crams his body into the quadrant opposite Clay, and Clay slams on the brakes, bringing time inside this circle to a halt. The fire of anger on the agent’s face goes out—he looks confused, a sleepwalker awakened.
“Listen to me,” Clay says. “I can only hold us here for a while, and as soon as time speeds up again, he’s going to be back in your head. Do you understand me?”
“Please help me,” the agent says. “I don’t want to do this. The voice got so loud. He made me hurt my friends.”
“I know,” Clay says. “And in a minute he’s going to try to make you hurt me. Probably one of us is going to die. But we can hang out in this moment and be ourselves. My name’s Clay. What’s yours?”
The agent panics, unable to remember his own name. “Vince,” he says suddenly. He gasps for air. “My name’s Vince.”
“That’s good, Vince,” says Clay. “Let me ask you: you have kids?”
Vince shakes his head. “They don’t like us to have kids,” he says. “It’s not forbidden, but I don’t know anybody who does.”
“Well, now you know me, and I’ve got a son who’s fourteen,” Clay says. Behind Vince, the other agents approach, moving as if through a clear and viscous liquid. “If I hadn’t been in the Faction, I wouldn’t have him. That’s weird, right?”
Vince doesn’t seem to know how to respond to this. “Yeah?” he says after a pause. He sounds like Rai when he isn’t sure whether Clay’s asking him an actual question or a rhetorical one. Distracted by the memory, Clay’s ability slips and time within the revolving door comes closer to the pace of time around it. In that moment Clay sees all of Lexington Avenue fall into shadow, as if a dense cloud is passing over. The agents look up, and their faces show horror. Vince spins around, and, distorted by the slowing of time like a record with a thumb rested on its edge, the sounds of their screaming enter the revolving door.
Clay lets his grip on time go, ready for Vince to come at him as soon as he does, but Vince and Clay are transfixed as a ten-story building drops out of the sky and onto the hotel across the street. The building teeters like a drunk, then falls toward the Bishop Academy. Clay wants to warn the others in the lobby, but there’s no time. He braces himself in the doorway as the top of the building slams into the middle of the Bishop building like one domino falling against another.
Out in the street, it rains shards of black glass.
The stairwell shudders like a shivering spine as Carrie leads Hayden, Ji Yeon, and an indeterminate number of Bishop students up to the thirteenth floor.
“What the fuck was that?” Hayden asks.
“Something hit the building,” Ji Yeon says. “Sounded close.”
Carrie realizes the error she’s made. She was trained to fight normal people who came at her with two feet on the ground. She asked Cla
y to hold the front door, but why would she assume anyone would use the door?
“Wait here,” she calls down, knowing from the clamor of the kids that none of them are going to listen. They’re caught up in the field trip quality of all this. They’ve picked up more recruits on every floor, kids coming out of their dorms ready to storm the castle. Carrie considers the possibility that she’s leading them to their deaths.
Carrie throws her ability over Hayden and Ji Yeon. The throng of kids holds in the stairwell, but they won’t wait long. Carrie and the others climb the rest of this flight of stairs, then step through the utility door on the thirteenth floor into the short hallway between the elevator and the entrance to the headmaster’s quarters.
“You ever get to come up here?” Hayden asks her.
“Headmaster Bishop couldn’t stand me,” she says. She tries the doorknob and, seeing it’s locked, drops to one knee, pulls out her wallet, and extracts a set of thin metal shims. “He said I was his worst headache since Fahima Deeb,” she continues as she picks the lock. “Anytime I saw him in the hallway I accosted him about going public.”
“Look how well that turned out,” Hayden says. The lock gives, and the door pops open. They enter a nice apartment that’s been blown up recently. Because Carrie is familiar with bombs and their effects, the first thing she notices is that the damage is blown in rather than out. As she looks for the source, her attention is drawn outside the massive hole in the building’s western wall. The view of the street is blocked by another building leaning against the Bishop Academy, its roof smashed into the black glass of the floor above them. Shards of obsidian scatter across the wound in the building’s side, and more rain toward the street. The hole in the Bishop building aligns with shattered windows in what Carrie recognizes as the Phoenix school.
Emmeline’s face pops into one of the windows on the opposite side of a ten-foot gap. “Some help?” she asks.
A telekinetic student who joined as they passed the tenth-floor dorms volunteers his aid, floating Emmeline across the gap and landing her on the debris-strewn carpet of the headmaster’s living room.
“You dropped a building on us?” Hayden asks.
Stepping carefully through the broken glass and bent metal, Emmeline shrugs. “Kimani had to put it down somewhere,” she says. “And I can’t fold in higher than here while the building’s covered in black glass. He doesn’t want to let me in. This seemed like the best solution.”
“So you huffed and you puffed,” Carrie says.
“It’s a little dramatic,” says Hayden.
“I thought you’d like it,” Emmeline says.
“Now can you get us up to the top floor?” Ji Yeon asks.
Emmeline shakes her head. “The glass is cracked, but everything above is still his,” she says. “I won’t be much use until the top. I need you to get me up there.”
“What happens when we get you to the top?” asks Carrie.
“Everything comes together,” Emmeline says. Carrie looks over Emmeline’s shoulder at the Phoenix building and sees Rai through the window, bracing himself against a door, watching them.
* * *
—
On each of the office floors above the thirteenth, Faction agents fight one another, a snake with two heads, each snapping at the other. Carrie makes quick assessments. If it seems like the bad side’s winning, she has Viola weld the edges of the door shut. If the good guys have a chance, she dispatches students to their aid. It’s terrifying how easily the kids follow her orders. Every flight they go up, she’s leaving the place she knows. Since she stepped into the building, the thing in her head she thought Emmeline killed has itched. It’s not moving or whispering to her, but it tingles unpleasantly. She wishes she could pop her head open and claw it out.
With Emmeline in the lead, they step out at the top floor. There’s a door made of black glass, bigger than it needs to be, slightly ajar. Emmeline takes both of Viola’s hands in her own.
“Seal it up behind us,” Emmeline says. “No one else comes in.”
“What about me?” Viola asks.
“You don’t need to see what’s in there,” Emmeline says. “Seal the door and head downstairs.”
Viola nods, then shakes her head. “I’ll wait here to let you out,” she says. “After you win.” Emmeline hugs her tightly, then pushes the door open. Carrie, Hayden, and Ji Yeon follow her inside.
The room feels like a church with its cathedral ceiling and its vast space, but the moment Viola seals the door, it becomes claustrophobic. The carpet is damp and spongy underfoot, and the entire room is wallpapered in an unpleasant peach, including the vaulted ceiling. Carrie tries to pinpoint what’s making her uncomfortable, but all she can think is that the walls are breathing.
In the corner of the room, a thin wisp of a woman with matted blond hair stands with her back to them. She looks like the ghost of Sarah Davenport come back to haunt the school. She’s talking with someone tied to a chair. Carrie recognizes him as one of the Omars, his eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling, his mouth agape.
A stalagmite of flesh rises out of the floor in front of them and shapes itself into something vaguely human. Legs separate from each other, arms drip from a torso, and a head inflates on the stump of a neck like a soap bubble blown through a straw. Its features resolve into the pinched patrician face of Patrick Davenport with his sweep of blond bangs. The flesh around the body darkens to give the impression of clothes or at least a sense of modesty.
“Emmeline, it’s so good to see you,” he says. “I was gone most of the time you were here at Bishop, but I knew your—”
“Stop that,” Emmeline says. Emmeline is trying to sound commanding, but she sounds like a scared teenager. Patrick grins, and the grin widens into a painful rictus before it bisects his entire face. The top half of his head hinges back like some horrific toy as his body melts back into the floor. Tendrils wind through the air and twine together in the vacated space. The same process of resolution takes place, but it begins with a suit, perfectly tailored like something out of an old movie. Hands emerge from the cuffs, and a head, fully formed, rises from the collar, a man with classically handsome features, dark hair, and deep-set eyes. He gives Emmeline a tired smirk.
“You’re too late,” says Raymond Glover. Carrie recognizes his voice: she heard it in her head for years. “Also too late to interfere. I understand how you thought this was going to go, but let me show you what’s going to happen.”
Carrie feels it first on her ankle, then snaking up her leg. Dark tentacles of flesh wrap around Ji Yeon’s waist, Hayden’s neck. Carrie’s leg itches along the calf. She pulls the knife out of the back of her belt and stabs it into the tentacle, which lashes out, slashing across her cheekbone and brow, leaving a deep cut that narrowly misses her eye. She drops the knife and puts her hand to her bloodied face as another tentacle bats the knife out of her reach. She looks down to find it and sees that the tendril isn’t moving. It’s encased in the shimmering sheath of Clay’s deployed ability. She’s never seen him use it so precisely, wrapping a bubble of slow time around the winding tentacle, around each of the tentacles that have moved to grip their friends.
“Lobby’s secure,” he says. “The kid out front let me in.” His teeth are clenched, and his eyes are deep hollows.
“No,” says Emmeline, as if someone ruined her tea party. “You were supposed to stay downstairs.”
“I thought you could use the help,” Clay says. Carrie extracts her leg from Glover’s grasp, and the others extricate themselves as well.
“You’ve improved, Clay,” Glover says. “I bet given time you could have gotten the Chair to work for you. But how long do you think you can fight me?”
“He’s not the one who’s going to fight you,” Emmeline says. She takes Hayden’s hand and walks across the floor of flesh that writhes and snaps at th
eir ankles. Clay is in agony trying to hold Glover down while Carrie struggles to stay in place. Her part now is to let Hayden go. Sarah Davenport raises her head as Hayden and Emmeline approach. Hayden grows taller and thinner. Their features shift until they are a better, truer replica of Patrick Davenport than the poor puppet Glover assembled.
“Sarah,” Emmeline says softly. “I brought someone to see you.”
“Patrick,” says Sarah. “I thought you were gone.”
“I’m here,” Hayden says, their voice deep.
“Get away from her,” Glover snaps. A wave of flesh surges toward the three of them, but Clay slows it.
“I’m trying to take control, but I can’t remember myself,” Hayden said to Sarah. “If I had some piece of myself to hold on to, I could fight.”
“I remember you,” Sarah says. She places her hand against the wall, and Raymond Glover screams. The body he assembled out of Patrick’s flesh quivers and loses its edges, reduced to a thrashing mass.
“There you are,” Sarah says. Her eyes drift closed. “You’re hurting so much.”
“I tried to be stronger than him, but I couldn’t,” says Patrick’s voice, wheezing out of nowhere. It’s raspy, barely a whisper, but Carrie recognizes it from her time at Bishop. She remembers Patrick doling out barbed reprimands and occasional praise when she managed to best one of the lunkhead physical kids who populated his classes. He and his sister were so different but so similar in withholding compliments until students got off on them like a drug fix. She should have known it wasn’t Patrick who came to recruit her after Topaz Lake. He was effusive in his compliments. Patrick Davenport was never like that.
