by Chris Ward
Finally, they turned into a long, straight road lined by three-storey apartment blocks, many of which looked abandoned and derelict. At the end stood a large stately building with column pillars on either side of a set of wide wooden doors.
‘There,’ Jorge said. ‘Nozomi live there.’
‘Good god,’ Jennie said. ‘What do we do now?’
Jun looked across at Jorge and smiled. ‘We gun it,’ he said, slamming his foot down on the old bus’s accelerator.
34
A meeting with old acquaintances
‘Wake up, wake up, whoever you are.’
Someone was patting her cheek. Nozomi opened her eyes. The figure leaning over here was a blur at first, then as the features slowly came into shape she let out a gasp of horror.
The black eyes of her master’s would-be assassin watched her out of his pinched, pale face.
‘Get away from me!’
‘Such zest in one so young. Welcome to the end of your life, little girl.’
‘I’ll tell you where he is.’
‘Yes, indeed you will. You are a font of useful information, but all fonts run dry. Empty little girl.’
‘Sagrada Familia.’
‘Of course.’
‘Now let me go!’
The man’s fingers closed over her chin, pulling her up towards him. His fingers felt cold and rough like stone.
‘When you have looked into the eyes of the Reaper, there is no turning back,’ he said.
‘He’s dangerous,’ she gasped. ‘Take me. Bargain.’
‘You do not understand the concept of dangerous,’ the man said. ‘I am danger made flesh. Your friend is but a pawn, easily culled.’
The words came from nowhere: ‘My father will kill you.’
‘Your father….’
The assassin paused, his black eyes looking past her. His fingers relaxed on her chin and she was able to suck in a welcome breath.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
He dragged her towards the door, fingers tight around her arm. He moved quickly, making her stagger to keep up. It felt like he was gliding, his feet barely touching the ground. Nozomi’s feet repeatedly slipped out from under her, but her weight barely registered on the man, his arm holding her up, defying gravity.
He pushed out through the doors into the twilight. The street outside was orientated towards the west, where the sun was about to set. The man paused. Nozomi heard the sound of an engine and looked up to see a bus coming towards them out of the haze. It was the only moving vehicle in a street where other cars were parked haphazardly across the road. As she watched, one bumped off the front of the bus.
It was coming straight for them. Her kidnapper gave a surprised grunt, but made no attempt to move as it careened towards them like a driverless train, growing larger and larger.
The alterations to her body hadn’t made Nozomi strong enough to break through wood or steel, but she could destroy human flesh. With her free hand she stretched down and dug her fingers into the assassin’s calf muscle, ripping through the material of his trousers, piercing his flesh.
He cried out and let go of her. She dodged sideways as the bus became massive in her view, and then her kidnapper, crouching instinctively to grab his ruined calf, disappeared beneath the rushing block of metal as it slammed into the theatre doors and came to a grinding stop half in and half out of the old theatre’s lobby.
A plume of masonry dust filled the air, slowly leaving a grey shroud over everything. The bus’s gears rumbled and its back wheels spun, but it was stuck fast inside the building’s entrance. Nozomi heard a pop and a wheeze and then the bus’s engine went quiet.
There was no sign of the man who had attacked her. It was likely he was crushed somewhere underneath the bus. Surviving such an impact was impossible, even for a man of his unusual strength, but she didn’t want to wait around any longer, just in case. She turned to leave, not sure where she was going, but anywhere had to be better than this. Whoever had been driving the bus could be dangerous.
‘Nozomi!’
She turned at the sound of a familiar voice and saw a little face poking out of a broken window. Her heart lurched as she recognised the owner of the warm smile, even as he wiped a line of blood away from the side of his face.
‘Jorge!’
The clouds above her seemed to part, and she found herself running towards him, grabbing his arms, helping him climb out. She pulled him tight in a vicious hug, even as something metal poked into her hip.
‘Came to save you,’ Jorge whispered into her ear in Spanish.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered back. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I brought friends. We’ll help you together.’
She looked over his shoulder as two other people climbed out of the broken bus. They were Japanese like her, and they looked … looked … vaguely familiar…?
Uncle Jun.
He had aged, but in that barely noticeable way that wine ages. His skin was slightly paler than she remembered, his hair shorter, his face a little tighter over the bones, the bags under his eyes more prominent than before.
Uncle Jun.
She hadn’t seen him since that day her mother died. Nozomi had watched, clutched in her master’s arms, as the woman with the soothing voice and the calming smile who wanted nothing other than to protect her, fell from the catwalk of Heigel Castle and vanished into the trees below. The day that her master had always told her that her uncle was responsible for, the day her mother could have been saved if only Jun Matsumoto had put away his own selfish needs and thought of hers.
Uncle Jun!
Something was buzzing just behind her eye, like a radio transmitter going haywire. Great throbs of pain lanced through her like rusty knives, poking and stabbing. Uncle Jun was staring at her like she was a ghost, Uncle Jun who was responsible for her mother’s death, and who had sent the assassin to kill her and her master.
The angular piece of metal poking out of Jorge’s belt into her hip had taken no prominence until now. As she realised what it was she reached for the gun and snatched it away, pushing the boy aside and pulling the gun up to train it on the man she had always thought of as her uncle.
‘Nozomi, it’s me! What are you doing?’
When she heard the sound of his voice her vision blurred, and a great cloud of pain seemed to send her eyes spinning backwards into her head. She felt a bloom of rage and it was all she could do to form words out of a thundering cloud of anger.
‘You killed her!’ she shrieked. ‘You killed my mother!’
Jun raised a hand. Nozomi recognised the other woman as her uncle’s companion. She had been there too that day. They both deserved to die.
‘I didn’t kill her!’ Jun shouted. ‘Crow killed her! That bastard killed all of them!’
Nozomi wanted to gun him down; the urge was almost overwhelming, but at the same time she wanted him to grovel, to suffer. She wanted him to know how she felt, how it felt to watch your mother fall.
As her finger tightened on the trigger, she jerked it sideways, away from him. The bullet hit the woman in the shoulder, exiting with a puff of blood. She screamed and staggered, her legs folding up under her like a new-born calf. She sat down hard, blood dripping down her shirt.
‘Jennie!’ Jun screamed, dropping to his knees beside her, pulling her up against him. He looked utterly helpless and pathetic, his hands flapping like a netted fish. It was almost a mercy to put him out of his misery. Nozomi took a couple of steps forward and lifted the gun.
‘Stop.’
A hand fell over the barrel. Jorge. The little boy pulled it towards his own chest and held it there with both hands.
‘Shoot,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
‘Get out of the way!’
‘Shoot me.’ He smiled. ‘I’m nothing. No one would miss me. Kill me, but leave them.’
Nozomi jerked the gun back out of his hands and brought it swinging around against his head. Jorge fell to the groun
d, his hands clutching his temple. His legs twitched, but he didn’t get up.
Nozomi turned towards Jun. ‘I’ll take you to my master,’ she said. ‘He’ll decide what to do with you.’ Gesturing to Jennie, she said, ‘Follow me and bring Jorge. Do anything stupid and I’ll kill both of you.’
Jennie staggered to her feet, and went to shake Jorge awake. Her shirt was sticky with blood, but it wasn’t pumping out so the bullet had missed any arteries. Nozomi wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or not. Part of her felt bad, while another part of her was sad she’d missed the woman’s heart.
Waving the gun back and forth between Jun and Jennie with Jorge hobbling at her side, she forced them into the old changing room where she had been trapped with the Akane-thing. As Jun went to enter, Nozomi shook her head. ‘You come with me,’ she said, kicking the door shut on Jorge and Jennie. She pulled the key off its hook and locked it, leaving the key half twisted in the lock.
‘You have to listen to me,’ Jun said.
At the sound of his voice her anger bloomed again. She pointed the gun at his feet so as to not to risk killing him.
‘Move,’ she said.
‘Put the gun down.’
‘Move or I’ll blow your face off.’
‘No, you won’t.’
Nozomi pointed the gun a couple of feet to the side of Jun’s face and pulled the trigger. The discharge was deafening. Jun dropped to his knees, his hands over his ears. The gun jumped in Nozomi’s hand, still smarting from the previous shot, but she managed to keep hold of it. She locked Jun with a stare.
‘I will kill you.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Jun raised his hands. He opened his mouth to say something more, but Nozomi gave a sharp shake of her head.
No.
Her master could deal with him. Part of her wanted to see him dead on the ground in front of her, but another part couldn’t bring herself to do it. She remembered him from before the bad times, when he had still been her de facto uncle. Always a kind word, an easy smile, even when she could sense a churning emotional turmoil behind his eyes. Her parents had never told her about his past: she had learned it from her master. But how much of that could be believed?
She turned as something broke through the doors at the top of the stairs, and she lifted the gun, expecting to see the man the bus had buried in the wreckage somehow come back to life. Instead it was one of her master’s spiders, scuttling down the steps towards them, its multitude of computerised eyes fixed on Jun.
‘Stop!’ she screamed at it. ‘Come here!’
The spider turned to her, lifting itself up on its back legs, its forelegs extended like pincers ready to strike. It hissed at her, and she pointed the gun at the pale circle of human skin deep in its midriff, like the head of a baby protruding from a womb.
‘I know he controls you,’ she shouted. ‘Give him a message. I have Jun Matsumoto. I want to bring him to La Sagrada Familia.’
The spider dropped on to its feet again and started forward, only for Nozomi to fire the gun into the floor in front of it, stumbling backwards with the discharge. The spider stopped again.
‘Tell him!’
Its foremost pair of legs pawed at the air as if shadow typing. Nozomi wondered how many bullets had been in the gun and how many were left. Perhaps one, perhaps none. She waited. Jun was a few feet to her right, wisely staying silent.
The spider hissed again, but this time dropped its body to the ground. With its legs poking up around it, it skittered forward towards her, then stopped and waited.
It barely looked big enough to carry one person, let alone two, but it sat there waiting in front of her, its eyes flickering beneath the dim ceiling lights. She looked across at Jun.
‘On,’ she said.
She made him climb on first, then she got on behind. She had no choice but to hold on to him, but with one hand she kept the gun pressed into his side. ‘Don’t speak,’ she said. ‘Don’t say a word or I’ll kill you.’ Then, to the spider, she shouted, ‘Take us!’
Riding the spider as it leapt forward and rushed out of the broken front entrance of the theatre was like one long, uncomfortable fairground ride. She hooked her feet around the ridges of two middle legs to hold herself steady, but with each second that passed she felt closer to being thrown off. Only when the spider paused to check its surroundings did she get a chance to readjust herself, to get a better grip.
Apart from the occasional cry of pain, Jun was silent as the spider scuttled through the streets, leaping over abandoned cars like a hurdler in a junkyard race, showing no sign that their weight troubled it. Her master had built them well, and while the thing was an abomination, she couldn’t help but marvel at his skill.
He was a genius the like of which the world had never seen. Even so, it was hard for Nozomi to shake the thought that it might have been better if he had never been born at all.
35
The cast of characters
Stay silent.
With his own head clear now that the Akane-thing was far away and perhaps too damaged to contact him, Jun could see in Nozomi’s eyes the way his voice affected her. The girl had grown up since Heigel, transforming from a cute kid into a striking preteen, strong eyes set into a face that was blossoming into beauty. If he dared speak though, that beauty would vanish behind a grimace of pure hatred. It was as if the moment his words fell from his tongue her anger bulged and raged like a storm caught in a jar. What if Kurou had done to her the same thing he had done to Jun?
Akane’s voice in his head led him to do uncontrollable things, and when she was near Jun lost himself. What if it was her voice causing it? And what if there was something in his that caused Nozomi to lose her mind with rage?
Whenever Akane spoke to him he felt a surging pain behind his left eye. Did Nozomi feel something similar?
The spider was an abomination of metal and stolen flesh. The whole thing stank of rot and grease, blood and engine oil. Bubbles of dark fluid popped from between its joints as it moved, and Jun was unable to avoid the stuff getting over his hands. It was sticky and it smelt bad, and he wondered if it would ever come off. It was so thick he could literally write his name—
Jun had to suppress a gasp of delight.
Of course.
He pulled up one sleeve, then dipped a finger into a globule of stuff and wrote on his arm as neatly as he could:
He’s put something in your head.
Then he twisted, holding out his arm towards Nozomi. The girl started to lift the gun, then stopped. She frowned as she read the words. Before she could say anything, Jun pulled his arm back and hastily added: He’s controlling you, making you hate me.
‘You killed my mother!’ she screamed, almost losing her balance as the spider leapt to one side to avoid a speeding motorcycle. What the driver must have thought of them, Jun could only imagine.
Jun shook his head. No. Then, on the back of his hand: He stole you.
‘No!’
He was running out of space. On the casing of the spider he wrote: Ken said find you. Bring you back. I promised.
Nozomi was crying now. She rubbed at a spot just above her left eye, using her gun hand, an involuntary action that meant so much. That was where Jun hurt too.
As she lowered her hand Jun spun, grabbing her gun hand and slamming the butt of the weapon back towards her face. It landed with a dull thud. The girl slumped sideways, almost falling off the back of the spider. As her fingers opened to release the gun, Jun grabbed it and shoved it back into his shirt, pulling Nozomi against him. She groaned, her head lolling drunkenly. Her eyelids fluttered and she groaned, a line of spittle running down her chin. He didn’t dare speak, in case his naïve plan hadn’t worked. The girl could be dead or paralyzed, or she could just be sleeping and would go into a rage the moment he opened his mouth.
The spider leapt around a corner, skidding to a brief stop. Jun gasped. The massive ornate façade of La Sagrada Familia loomed in front of him. The façade itself
was eighty metres high, four ornate towers rising high above the doors, poking up into the sky like giant upturned ice cream cones. Beyond them eight other towers made up the twelve for the Apostles, while rising out of the great church’s centre were the twin behemoths for Mary and Jesus, the latter topped with a huge cross a hundred and seventy metres above the city streets.
It would have been awe inspiring in different circumstances. As it was, Jun wanted to get off before the spider got through the crack in those huge wooden doors. He twisted, pulling Nozomi against him, looking for a safe place to jump down, but the spider leapt forward again. Its knees rose and fell like the pistons of a textiles loom, the edges of its joints sharp enough to slice through clothes and skin.
They rattled across a wide courtyard lined with trees and idyllic ponds, Jun hanging on to Nozomi with one hand, the other holding on to a tuft of hair on the spider’s back. He held the gun in the same hand he had hooked around the girl, and tried to angle it down towards the spider, hoping for a clean shot. If he could get it dead centre, maybe he could—
A roar came from the streets to their left and suddenly the space in front of them was filled with milling people, a fiery cascade of rioters carrying poles and stakes and knives and an assortment of other makeshift weapons. In seconds they had filled the space in front of the great doors and were trying to find a way in.
The spider didn’t break stride. It scuttled up the nearest tree, pushing itself through the foliage, the leaves and branches ripping at Jun’s face, threatening to pull both him and Nozomi off. Then it was balancing delicately on top of the tree, bracing itself before leaping forward and landing in the next like some tree-hopping monkey. As rioters milled in the park spaces below them, the spider advanced on La Sagrada Familia like a jungle commando, unseen.
