Chapter 18: Garrick’s Final Pursuit
Chapter 18: Garrick’s Final Pursuit
I went out the window.
It cost me more than I had. The frame gave on the second kick and I landed on the far side in a heap that would have been funny in any other week. Behind me the cabinet went over as the door came in, and Garrick’s voice filled the utility block — not my name, which was worse, just a single furious noise.
He was faster. He was always going to be faster. My legs were still the same badly made things they had been before the Anchor, and at that moment they felt roughly as useful as good shoes in a car chase.
So I ran the way I’d learned to fight: sideways. Through a collapsed loading bay. Over a fence where the mesh had rotted at the post. Down a service alley too narrow for his shoulders at speed. Each bought me eight seconds, maybe ten, and every time he came through the obstacle instead of around it he took some of them back.
And the whole time, the new sense kept talking.
That was the problem. Dimensional Energy Perception didn’t switch off, didn’t filter, and had no interest in the fact that I was busy. The city was filthy with the stuff — warped patches where the Merge had folded a street into something else, old residue lying over everything like grease, thin bright threads where something had passed recently. It arrived as pressure and grain and temperature that wasn’t temperature, and twice I nearly ran into a wall because I’d been reading the wrong sense.
Physical evidence first, I told myself, hauling around a corner. Use the sense to check, not to decide.
Two blocks north, both agreed.
There was a structure ahead — an old multi-storey car park with its upper decks caved into each other, concrete ribs showing. To the perception it was a well. Not a stain like the thing out east. A dense, coiled, slowly-turning concentration, and it had a centre.
And the street told the same story in plainer language.
No rats — and I’d been in this city long enough to know that the absence of small scavengers is never good news. A rib cage in the gutter forty metres from the entry ramp, picked white, too big to be a dog. Three deep parallel gouges in the ramp wall at head height, spaced like fingers. And quiet: not the ordinary broken quiet of a dead district, but the specific quiet of a place where everything with an instinct has already left.
I stopped behind a dead delivery van, and I got about four breaths of thinking time, and I used all of them.
I could not lose Garrick. Not tonight, not tomorrow. He’d tracked me across a complex with his eyes full of chilli powder. He had Silas, and Silas was better at this than I would ever be, and there was no version of the next week in which I outran them on foot with an Anchor hangover and one kitchen knife.
I looked at the ramp.
If I go in there and he follows me in there, I thought, very clearly, so that I would not be able to lie about it later, he will die.
That’s not an accident. That’s what I’m choosing.
I want to be honest: there was no long moral struggle. There was a cold four seconds where I looked at the shape of it, and understood exactly what I was doing, and decided that I would rather live.
I let him see me.
I stepped out from behind the van into the open and stood there until his head came around, and then I did the thing I had promised myself I wouldn’t do again so soon. I let my shoulders drop. I let him see me breathing hard. I let a hundred points of Charisma sit on me in the streetlight-less dark, which is not mind control and never has been, and which does nothing at all except make what a man already wants louder in his own head.
"Garrick." My voice cracked, which I hadn’t planned and couldn’t have done better. "I can’t— I can’t keep running."
His whole posture changed.
"No," he said. Almost gentle. "You can’t."
"Just—" I backed toward the ramp. "Just stay there. Don’t come at me. I’ll—"
He came at me. Of course he did. I moved because I had told him not to.
Behind him, at the alley mouth, Silas Rook stopped walking.
I saw it happen. He came around the corner at a jog and then went absolutely still, head up, and he looked at the car park the way a man looks at a river he isn’t going to swim.
"Garrick." Sharp. "Garrick. Not in there."
Garrick didn’t even turn his head.
I went up the ramp.
Inside, the perception did the work my eyes couldn’t. The dense centre sat on the third level, and around it the energy lay in rings — thickest at the core, thinning outward — and I ran the outer edge of it the way you’d walk a frozen pond by staying near the bank. Twice I felt the pressure lean toward me and I changed line before I knew why. Rubble everywhere. The smell was ammonia and old fat.
Garrick came up behind me, loud, furious, blood on his forearm from a cut I’d given him three hours ago.
"You’re not going anywhere," he called. His voice boomed in the concrete. "You never were. You’ve just been making it take longer."
I got behind a collapsed pillar on the third level, out past the far side of the core, with a gap I could fit through and he could not.
He was thirty metres in. Deep enough.
There was a heap of steel shelving lying between us, one end propped against the wall and the other half-buried in something that had been bones for a long time.
This is the part, I thought.
I planted my boot against the nearest frame and shoved. The whole heap tipped away from me, sections falling one after another toward Garrick.
The noise was enormous — a long collapsing clatter that rolled through the whole level and ended almost at Garrick’s feet — and I got through the gap, put my back against cold concrete, and made myself stay still.
Garrick stopped. "Adrian—"
Something came off the ceiling.
I didn’t see it properly. I’ve been grateful for that. What I got was an impression of length — a body too long for its own limbs, pale as something grown in a jar, moving along the underside of the ramp above with its weight hanging from four points, and it came down onto the deck between us without any sound at all except the crack of the concrete accepting it.
[Hollowed Strider — Level 11]
Eleven. Garrick was nine.
He tried. I’ll give him that. He got his shoulder into it and actually moved the thing — a Level 9 driving that back half a metre, which two days ago would have been the most frightening thing I’d ever seen. Then it took his arm in a way arms don’t go, and after that he was just a large man being disassembled by something that had done it before.
"Adrian!"
It wasn’t a threat. That’s what I keep coming back to. At the end he wasn’t threatening me. He was calling for me the way you call for someone you think is on your side, because right up until the last second he genuinely believed I belonged to him, and belonging goes both ways in a mind like that.
I stayed where I was. I did not make a single sound that might have turned that thing’s head.
I watched until I was certain. Then I went down the far stairwell with my hands shaking again for the first time since the Anchor, and I got out onto the street and made it about a hundred metres before I stopped and was sick against a wall.
I planned that, I thought, wiping my mouth. Every step. The van. The voice. The shelving.
I didn’t try to talk myself out of it. He would never have stopped, and I would have died, and both of those things were true — and it was also true that a man was dead tonight because I had thought about it carefully and then done it well. I could hold both. I just couldn’t put either of them down.
I walked north for three hours.
Somewhere past the reservoir road the horizon changed, and I stopped in the middle of the street and stared at it like an idiot.
Lights. Not fires — lights, in rows, the flat white of working floodlamps. A wall built out of shipping containers and poured concrete, four metres high, with figures moving along the top of it on a walkway. A gate with a lit sign above it, and under the sign, people. Queuing. Alive. Ordinary.
EASTBRIDGE — REGISTERED SETTLEMENT
I hadn’t seen a working electric light since the Merge.
I started walking toward it, and I did not think, even once, to ask what it cost.