“Brave,” Gwerrus growled. ”Stupid brave.”
“Sculan abretoan cnapa,” Egesa muttered, just beside Krouse’s ear.
Gwerrus shook her head. ”Na. Wac thurfan cnapa with huntians ferranan, Matryoshka cunnan fealdan cnapa.”
Egesa shoved Krouse so that he stumbled forward, finding himself in the middle of the three.
“English? Anglo?” Matryoska asked.
“We need the boy,” Gwerrus said. ”You fold him.”
“Uh huh,” Matryoshka said. ”We’ll need more.”
“We’ll find more.”
“Soon? Women I just took will be all dissolved.”
“Soon,” Gwerrus said.
Krouse couldn’t help but notice how even her dialect had changed since she’d absorbed the woman into her. ”You don’t have to do this.”
Egesa kicked him from behind, and Krouse fell to his hands and knees.
“Don’t hurt him,” Matryoshka said.
“They are enemies,” Gwerrus growled. ”They hunt us.”
“We’re not hunting you,” Krouse said.
Egesa kicked him again for his trouble, driving a heel into Krouse’s kidney. Krouse grunted and writhed at the pain. The screaming in his head was bad, now, almost drowning everything out. It was almost affecting his vision. He couldn’t help but think about the pressure of being deep underwater, being so deep he was barely able to function, except this wasn’t imagined. It was real, despite being all in his head. That same pressure dimmed everything around the edges of his vision, made shadows darker and lights brighter. When spots appeared in his vision, he could almost imagine they were images.
Egesa pressed the tip of one scythe to Krouse’s eyelid. ”Abysgian in eage? Yeh?”
Krouse slipped, so to speak. He hadn’t even realized he was resisting the song, but in the pain, in his momentary fear, he let himself listen, looked at the shapes that were filling the dark places he could see.
Am I giving up? This easily? The others need me. The others…
“Noelle,” he mumbled.
“Francis?”
He winced. ”Call me Krouse. Everyone but my mom does.”
“Krouse,” Noelle tried the word. ”Okay. You want something?”
“Just wanted to talk. When we were marking each other’s papers in class, I got yours. I just wanted to say I like the way you think.”
He could see her expression change, as though the whole paradigm of the conversation had shifted. What did I say?
“Thanks,” she said. Her eyes dropped to her lunch tray, and she speared a piece of lettuce on her fork. She popped it into her mouth and chewed, slowly, methodically, then glanced up at Krouse. The meaning was clear. With body language alone, she was asking, why are you still here?
“Comparing the way you write an essay to how you’d design a game, plotting things both on a mechanical and general level. It was interesting to read. Nerdy in all the best ways. That’s a compliment, in case you’re left wondering.”
“Alright. Thanks.”
He was turning to leave when he saw Marissa Newland approach and sit down next to Noelle. They weren’t people he’d expected to see together. It wasn’t that Noelle was unattractive, only that Marissa was a swan, one of the better looking girls in the school, and Noelle was maybe best described as a sparrow. Small, nervous, plain. He hadn’t imagined they had any shared interest, social circles or friends.
Marissa moved a small plate with a square of pizza on it to Noelle’s tray, before looking up at Krouse. ”Krouse? You need something?”
“Nah, said what I wanted to say.”
“Don’t pester her, ‘kay?”
“I”m not doing anything more annoying than distracting her from lunch, and I was already leaving.”
“You two know each other?” Noelle asked.
Krouse answered before Marissa could. ”Our moms both do a lot of volunteer stuff for the school. Bake sales and crap. Been a couple of times where we both got dragged in to help and wound up working together.”
“So I know exactly what to watch out for with you,” Marissa said. ”At any given point in time, you’re pulling some nefarious prank, you’re manipulating others to get what you want, you’re making someone else look bad-”
“Stop. All this praise is going to make me blush.”
“Sixth grade,” Marissa said, turning to Noelle, “He tells his teacher-”
“Aaand I’m out of here,” Krouse said, making sure to interrupt her, “I forgot Marissa knew about the more embarrassing stories.”
“Good riddance to you, then,” Marissa said, smiling lightly.
He wasn’t two steps away when he heard her saying, “The Ransack qualifiers-”
He turned, interest piqued.
“What?” Marissa said. ”Do I need to get back to the story to scare you off? Or are you going to make some crack about girls and video games?”
“No, I’m not. You said qualifiers? As in competitive level?”
“Yeah. We have a club we organized through the school, to manage it. It was the only way I could get access to a computer without my mom looking over my shoulder.”
“No kidding. That’s the same one Luke’s in? You know Luke Brito?”
“Yeah. He’s in the group.”
“Ah,” he said. He floundered. ”I’m sort of lost for words. The bar for that sort of thing is higher than a lot of people think. Even getting to the point where you’re in the qualifiers is pretty respectable. Kudos.”
“Thanks,” Marissa said.
“I won’t subject you to my presence any longer. Good luck tonight. Really.”
“You play?” Noelle asked, the question abrupt. She tore off a bit of pizza crust and popped it into her mouth.
It took Krouse a second to mentally shift gears. ”Some. Casually.”
Marissa looked at Noelle to double check, then gestured towards the empty seat across from them.
Krouse sat, winced as a plastic tray clattered to the ground.
Marissa screamed, the sound abruptly cutting off as she was tossed from the counter where the plastic trays were stacked to the ruined counter where the soft drink dispensers had been. She gasped for breath, struggled to climb to her feet and fell. She was too dazed, and the ruined counter didn’t offer much in the way of solid traction. Gwerrus advanced on her.
Krouse forced himself back to reality, hurried to climb to his feet, only to feel the scythe’s blade press hard to his neck, only his scarf keeping it from severing flesh.
The screaming in his head was back, worse than ever. After the peace of the memory, the tranquility of being free of the screaming, still experiencing the warm buzz that surged through him, this wasn’t where he wanted to be.
“Began’na weorc,” Egesa hissed in his ear.
“Don’t understand a fucking thing you’re saying,” Krouse responded. In a strange way, he was pissed. Pissed in the way he might be if he’d been woken abruptly from a good dream. He knew it wasn’t rational, knew it wasn’t even healthy to think that way when the Simurgh was this dangerous, this insidious, but he was still upset.
So maybe, in the smallest way, it gave him the push he needed to reach beneath his coat, to where he’d stashed the sheathed kitchen knife. With his other hand, he found and dug his gloved fingers into the wound the spear had made, simultaneously twisting, putting his less vulnerable shoulder in the way of Egesa’s scythe-hand.
It didn’t matter. Egesa’s knees folded as Krouse twisted his fingers in the wound, dug deep. The knife’s sheath clattered to the ground, and Krouse dragged the blade across Egesa’s long neck.
Egesa pushed him away, blood fountaining down the front of his body. Krouse’s fingers were plucked free of the wet, sucking wound as the freak backed away. Egesa disappeared into wisps of dark smoke.
“Stupid brave boy,” Gwerrus said.
Krouse glanced around the room as the massive bear of a woman turned to face him. Marissa was only just managing t
o stand, while Cody had backed up to the opposite end of the room, crowbar in hand. Matryoshka was on her hands and knees, not far from Cody.
“Run!” he shouted. ”Scatter!”
He was only turning to run away from the brutish Gwerrus when he realized the others might not be in a state to run. Marissa had been thrown hard, and he wasn’t sure what kind of condition Cody was in.
Not that it mattered. Gwerrus picked Krouse for her target.
She wasn’t fast. There was some small blessing in that. But he quickly realized that she was keeping up with him, and she didn’t have half the trouble he did in wading through the deeper patches of snow. Slipping on ice, too, didn’t prove to be a problem for her when she weighed enough that the ice shattered with each footfall.
She caught up to him before he was clear of the plaza, grabbed him by the seat of his pants and the back of his coat.
He stabbed at her hand with the knife, and felt a fierce agony tear through his own hand.
Blood welled out from his palm, warm as it ran down his arm to his elbow. Krouse screamed.
“No,” Gwerrus growled in her deep voice. ”Stupid boy.”
“Begone,” a man intoned.
Krouse felt himself slip from her grasp. He dropped to the ground.
“Do it quickly,” another man said.
Krouse turned to look, but he saw everything through a monochrome haze. His own hand seemed smoky, faint.
I’m a ghost?
“Any insights, Myrddin?” a man in armor spoke. Gwerrus backed away as he advanced. A giantess and a man in a suit of gleaming armor. The man twirled a halberd in one hand.
“A protective power. I just got a glimpse of the idea behind it. Retribution,” the first man said. He was behind the man in armor, wearing a robe. ”Her power’s based around retribution for damage done.”
“Damage reflection?” the man in armor asked. ”Or does she get more durable as you attack her?”
“More likely to be the former than the latter.”
Krouse stood as the man in armor walked up to him. Walked past him as though he weren’t even there.
“I am stronger than you,” Gwerrus snarled.
The armored man didn’t reply.
“Why do this? Why hunt us?” Gwerrus asked, backing away.
The armored man slammed his halberd down against the ground, and smoke billowed around him. A moment later, there was a sound like a gunshot. Gwerrus dropped to one knee, one meaty hand pressed to her chest.
There was a tink and she was set on fire, head to toe.
The flames were hot enough and close enough to Krouse that they could have burned him, should have burned him. But he barely felt the warmth of them. Barely felt anything. The Simurgh’s scream had faded, and his own wounded hand was little more than a dull throb.
“Hey,” Krouse said, turning to the man in armor. There was no response. ”Hey, my friend needs-”
“That was reckless,” Myrddin said, speaking over Krouse. ”Attacking when we didn’t know the particulars of her power.”
“Two most likely vectors for it,” the armored man said, talking as though he couldn’t hear Krouse. He raised his voice a little to be heard over Gwerrus’ screams. ”Either she needed to see me, or there needed to be some correlation between me and the damage done. Smoke plus a nonlethal bullet works as a test for the first case. Besides, priority one is minimizing interactions, right?”
“Yes. But it was still reckless.”
Krouse turned to Myrddin. ”My friend’s dying. Can you help her?”
Myrddin walked ahead, dismissing the smoke with a wave of the craggy wooden stick he carried.
“Dragon?” the armored man said.
“I’m here,” the woman’s voice came from the armbands that they’d fixed around their wrists.
“Myrddin just shunted some kid out to minimize contact. I saw some blood. If I mark the location, can we get emergency services here for when he pops back in?”
“We’re overloaded. Was it a severe injury?”
“Bad, but not severe.”
“We don’t have the vehicles or personnel to spare, and quarantine will still be in effect.“
“Right. Where did our target land?”
“Two hundred feet away, down your four o’clock, Armsmaster.“
“How are we for exposure?”
“You two are good for another seventeen minutes at the exposure you’re facing. Twenty if we push it. I can have a flight unit to you shortly.“
Krouse hurried to follow them as they changed direction and began briskly walking toward the end of the street..
Myrddin spoke up, “How’s the fight going?”
“It goes well. But we can’t let our guards down.“
“No,” Myrddin agreed. ”This is a bad one. Too many possible avenues to cover, too much exposure time across the board.”
“We’re doubling down quarantine, and we’ll have a processing center in place shortly. The President is pushing the D.D.I.D measure.“
“It’s going to backfire,” Myrddin said. ”I’ve said it before, I’ll say it now, and I’ll remind you all I said it with every chance I get, from now until the day I die. It’s going to backfire.”
“I don’t disagree,” Dragon said.
“But you’re helping to enforce it.”
“I’m following orders.”
“No offense, I like you, Dragon, but that’s the oldest excuse in the book.”
“I’m merely picking my battles.“
“If you’re not going to fight this battle, then what will push you to make a stand?”
“Myrddin,” Armsmaster cut in, “Ease up. And pay attention. This is it.”
Krouse stared. It was a section of building. White tile and white walls, a desk, and a metal cabinet with a shattered glass pane. File folders were strewn over the floor and desk. In the midst of it all was a man in a white lab coat. His body had been shattered by the impact.
“Damnation. If we could only look into this…” Armsmaster said.
“Priority one. Minimize exposure.”
“I know. But this stands to answer a great many questions. If we can find where she opened that portal to-”
“If she’s answering questions for us, we don’t want to know,” Myrddin said.
Armsmaster sighed. ”I know. Can you shift this into one of your pocket dimensions?”
“I get bad interactions if I transition something in of one of my dimensions and back, or if I take things out of one dimension and put them into another. It doesn’t compartmentalize into the dimension properly if it’s been elsewhere too recently. Whether these people and objects came from somewhere halfway across the globe or some pocket dimension, I don’t think we want to test our luck and risk something disastrous.”
Krouse startled at that. Is that what happened to me? Some bad interaction of interdimensional crap?
“I’m thinking white phosphor?” Armsmaster suggested. Myrddin nodded.
Dragon chimed in, her voice sounding from the armbands on their wrists, “Can’t call in a strike until fifteen minutes after the Simurgh is gone. Mark the area. I’ve got another danger site a quarter-mile to your six o’clock. Then we’re getting you clear.“
“Got it,” Armsmaster said.
Armsmaster tossed a small canister into the middle of the section of laboratory, they cordoned off the area with red tape, and then they left. Armsmaster used a grappling hook to fly to a nearby rooftop while Myrddin took to the air.
With no way to follow, Krouse was left standing there. He prodded at a piece of rubble, but his hand passed through.
Yet he was able to walk on the hard ground? He couldn’t process it.
“I don’t understand,” he muttered to himself.
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
He folded his arms. That’s not something I ever expected to hear. ”You can’t blame me at least a little?”
“No,” Noelle said, shaking her head.
She looked miserable, and he felt a knot forming in the pit of his stomach as he saw just how unhappy she was. It wasn’t something he was familiar with, on a lot of levels. Quiet, she said, “You’ve been great.”
He spread his arms, “I don’t get it. I thought we were doing fine.”
“We aren’t! This is… it’s not working.”
“I’m okay with it. I enjoy spending time with you, and I didn’t get any impression you were having that bad of a time, either.”
“But we don’t- we aren’t-” She stared down at her feet. ”We’re stalled. It isn’t fair to you.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?”
“Don’t dismiss my concerns,” she said, managing to sound a little angry.
“No’, it’s fine. It’s cool. I get that there’s stuff you’ve got going on that you don’t want to tell me about. I can be a bit of a jerk sometimes, but I’m not an idiot. And I’m not going to twist your arm to get you to share, either. That’s your stuff, and I figure you’ll tell me in time. Or you won’t.”
“It’s not fair to you,” she repeated.
“I’m not saying things have to be equitable or balanced or fair or any of that. So who cares if things aren’t fair?”
“Don’t do that!”
He spread his arms for the second time in a minute, helpless. Don’t do what? Don’t make sense?
Long seconds passed. He studied her, saw how dejected she was. Only minutes ago they’d been having a good time talking. Then things had fallen apart without warning, and it sounded like she wanted to break up.
It’s like karma for all the times I’ve pulled shit on others. Only I did it in fun, and this isn’t fun in the slightest.
“Someone said, a little while ago,” Noelle spoke without looking at Krouse, “That I can’t really forge a good relationship with others until I have a good relationship with myself.“
“You don’t?”
Noelle didn’t say anything.
“I think you’re fantastic, if that counts for anything.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’ve been getting to know you some. And I have yet to see anything that’s going to scare me away.”
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