Chapter 54: And I Prayed...
The last stride hit the edge, and I went off the roof into open air like a man whose world has switched itself over to Mars’ gravity, going at a long forty-degree angle, gliding out over the empty road toward the compound while the whole front yard rose up to meet me.
Tikki rode the shoulder pocket without a sound.
No screaming, no claws going through the jacket and into my skin. Just his chin up and his ears flat, tracking the ground sliding past underneath us like he’d decided somewhere across the last few flights that falling out of the sky was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
[My little adrenaline junkie~]
At a body-length above the ground, I brought the grapple gun up, put the hook on a streetlight standing at the yard’s edge, and-
-Disssh-!-Woosh-!
The line snapped taut and hauled me up off the descent with more speed than I’d carried into it, slinging me in a hard arc out over the front yard before coming down onto the compound roof soft and quiet, boots settling into the rooftop’s gravel with about as much force as stepping off a curb.
"...the hell was that?" Nia’s voice crackled in my ear, dry and way too delighted. "That was soo cool!"
"A little bit~"
"Do it again!" I could hear the grin crawling into the words. "Go slower... That was kinda hot, and I’m not even ashamed enough to pretend it wasn’t."
"You’re supposed to be watching the compound. Not my ass."
"I’m an excellent multitasker."
Then the play dropped clean out of her voice, and it went flat and professional in the space of a single breath.
"Got eyes on folks. Second floor, left half, six or seven of them bunched up tight. A dude on the third floor on a window... close to rooftop’s stairs."
"Dude on the third floor isn’t alone," I replied, "I’m feeling six of them. There are three more with him in the room... two in the hallway."
Warm shapes spread through the floor under my boots, sitting close together in the dark of that sixth sense, doing whatever the last of an armed gang did after a woman on a rooftop had spent days slowly and patiently unmaking their sleep.
I started toward the door, the one that led down into the stairwell.
And this time, I wasn’t drowning in the presences my Awareness was feeding me.
In Nia’s apartment, I’d poured every scrap of perception I owned into the one person in front of me, funneled the whole of my attention down to a single narrow point until the room around me might as well have stopped existing, and it had damn near gotten me killed because of a flashbang taped to a ceiling I never once bothered to feel.
Not this time.
This time, my Awareness stayed wide and even across the entire rooftop, holding the people, the walls, the door, and the air all at once instead of tunneling down into any single piece of it.
And that, that alone, was the reason I felt the door was locked from the other side, from paces away.
A deadbolt, with a lock on it, sitting there in my mind’s eye as clear and sharp as if I were staring right at it
I stopped, brought the SR-25 up and-
-Dish-!
And the round left the barrel at a whisper, thirty decibels swallowed whole by the wind itself, and I felt the lock come apart, the whole mechanism bursting into ruined, useless pieces.
[...Damn... that is some smooth recoil...]
Every Credit of that obscene invoice, justified on rep one.
Reaching through the closed door with Telekinesis, I found the wrecked latch and slid it aside.
And just as I shifted my weight to step through it-
-Rumble-!
The world moved.
The entire building lurched underneath me, a hard shove of the ground that stumbled me hard enough that I needed to press my palm flat against the doorframe just to stand still, while the whole structure beneath me let out a deep grinding groan that came up through my soles and settled in that ugliest terror deep in the mind that should’ve still been a year away.
And a building away, the horde changed.
That endless roar broke apart all at once, thousands of throats stuttering and dropping and clawing back up into something higher as though now screeching in ecstasy.
My stomach had already sunk through the floor while the roof kept shaking.
Down in the shoulder pocket, Tikki had gone still.
The first time I ever threw us both off a roof, he’d buried himself deeper into the pocket with his ears pinned back and his claws buried in my skin.
Slowly, his head dropped, chin angling down past my arm toward the floor, toward the ground somewhere far under all of it, and low in his chest, a sound started up that I had never once heard come out of him across either of my lives.
A growl.
Low and steady and pointed straight down through the concrete, and I could not tell for the life of me whether he was growling at the tremor still rolling up through the ground, or at whatever might be riding up out of the dark right alongside it.
And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
"Nikki." Nia’s voice came back through the comms, and it was shaking a good deal harder than the ground ever had. "Nikki, that wasn’t-"
"Look." I cut clean across her before she could put the rest of it into the air, and I flattened my voice all the way down into what I hoped would sound certain, and I poured every ounce of will I had left into holding it right there. "... We get earthquakes out here all the time. You know that... Let’s not go sprinting straight at the worst possible outcome."
"But it felt like-"
"Nia." I cut her off again, gentle but firm and fast, before the thought could put down roots and start to grow. "... It was an earthquake. Completely natural. It is absolutely, one hundred percent not the thing you’ve got running loose in your head right now."
A breath came down the line, unsteady, and held.
She wanted to believe me.
I could hear in her breath exactly how badly she wanted to believe me.
"...okay," she finally said, her voice small.
And it was the smallest I had ever heard her get.
While I stood there in the open doorway with the dust still drifting down around me, and the most beautiful rifle of two lifetimes cradled across my hands, and Tikki still growling into the floor.
And I did the only thing there was left in the world to do.
I closed my eyes.
[Please...]
And I prayed...
[Just let it be an earthquake... Just this once, just this one single time, let me be the one who was wrong about the feeling in his gut...]
The ground went still under my feet.
But Tikki kept growling at it anyway.