Chapter 34 - 33 — Blood Against Blood II
We did not get everyone out.
I need that written down as plainly as the rest of it.
An attack came in from the northern side while a group of about thirty was moving across open ground toward Marek, and Lucia was too far along the corridor to close it.
The overhead structure came down across the middle of them.
Soldiers got seven or eight out from under the edge of it. There were others further in.
One man went back under the slab with his hands and would not come out.
He was still calling a name when two infantrymen dragged him backwards by the belt and the shoulders, because another attack was coming in and there was nothing under there left to reach.
He fought them the whole way. He was still fighting them when they put him through Passage.
Lucia got the rest of the section frozen in place so nothing else came down, and Marek widened the corridor and took forty through at once instead of twenty.
His nose had started bleeding by then. It did not stop.
"Close it," a soldier told him. "Sir, close it, you’re going to kill yourself."
Marek did not answer him, because there was a line of children coming across the yard toward the opening, and he was not going to be the reason they were still on that side of it.
---
I came out onto the exterior road when the last of them were coming up.
Marek had moved the anchor by then.
Holding one end of Passage in a basement while the far end sat four kilometres west had been costing him more than the distance was worth.
So once the machine hall was empty he collapsed it and reopened it out here on the road, with the two ends far closer together.
That is why everything after this happened where it happened.
The last hundred and forty people were coming up the stairwell, across sixty metres of open road, and through an opening Marek was holding at the western end of it.
Lucia was on that stretch with them, walking the line, keeping the stragglers moving and the wounded upright.
I was at the eastern end, between all of it and the facility.
Then white-gold fire came down across the road ahead of us.
Not into the column. Across the road, in a line, wall to wall, close enough to the front of the evacuation that the heat turned everybody back on themselves.
It was not an attack meant to kill. It was a door being closed.
I knew the Ability before I saw anybody, and I stopped walking before anyone else did.
A figure came through the heat.
I knew the shoulders, and the shape of the head through the shimmer.
I knew the way the weight was carried slightly forward on the front foot, because he had been doing that since he was eleven and I had never been able to correct it.
Aurelian came out of his own fire wearing Varga’s colours.
Nine of them moved into position behind him, and they moved when he lifted two fingers, and none of them looked at anybody else before they did it.
He had put on weight through the shoulders. That was the thing that reached me, standing in a road with a burning line across it and four hundred people at my back.
Not the insignia. Not the nine men waiting on his hand.
He had been thin at nineteen, in the way boys are before the body decides what it is going to be.
I had put him out of a house in that condition, and it had taken me eight months to stop thinking about whether he was eating.
Somebody had been feeding him.
The plane I had ready came apart in my hands.
I have not done that since I was twenty-two.
I put it up again and it came out uneven along one edge and would not sit flat, so I let it go and made a third, and by then I had lost four seconds I did not have.
"Lucia. Marek. Keep them moving."
Aurelian looked past me at the line of people going through the corridor.
"You’re taking them."
"They’re leaving."
"They were supporting the resistance."
There was a soldier crossing behind me at that moment carrying a girl of about four who had both arms around his neck and her face in his collar.
I turned my head half an inch toward them.
"So arrest the child."
His mouth tightened, and for a fraction of a second he looked exactly like he had looked at nineteen in a borrowed room, and then he put it away.
"We don’t have to do this."
"Move."
He did not move.
---
His men went first, which I noticed at the time and have thought about since.
One of them tore structural beams out of the damaged facility and threw them at the evacuation line, four at once, spinning.
Lucia put Zero Frost into them while they were still in the air. Steel that cold stops being steel, and all four came apart against the road rather than through the people on it.
Another one came across the road at Marek at a speed and a shape that a human body should not make, stretching as he came.
Marek had most of himself inside Passage and could not Riftstep out of the way without dropping it.
I put a plane between them.
The man bent around the edge of it, which I had not seen before and did not enjoy.
So I stopped using it as a wall and rotated the whole plane on its axis, and caught him halfway around it, and put him into the road hard enough to leave a shape.
Something hit me across the back with compressed air. Bastion took most of it and I still went five metres, and Reprisal started filling again, and I did not have anywhere to put it yet.
And through all of that, Aurelian stood in the road and watched me.
He watched me fight three of his people while holding a barrier between them and four hundred civilians, and I could see him doing arithmetic.
Then he came in himself.
> **[Sol Invictus]**
White-gold crawled up over his shoulders and down both arms until he was wearing it, the same mantle they would be putting on broadcasts within a year.
He caught the edge of my nearest panel in one burning hand and pushed heat into it until it cracked.
"Look at you."
I reinforced the panel and did not answer.
"You’re doing it again. Standing in a road for people who would have been dead ten minutes ago without you."
I drove the barrier forward and made him give ground.
"And that means I should let them die?"
He came around it rather than through it.
Sol Invictus is not only a coating. It moves him.
He crossed the gap faster than a man his size crosses anything and put a burning fist into the Bastion on my forearm, and the road cracked in a ring under both of us.
"That is not what I said."
He hit the arm again.
"Look at this place. Look at what is actually happening. Humans running. Soldiers dying to buy forty seconds. Whole fronts turning on which side has more of us."
He got a knee up and I turned it off my hip.
"Without us they are nothing."
I caught the next punch on a plane and turned it aside, and I put a Bastion forearm across his ribs hard enough to move him.
"Weaker."
He staggered two steps.
"Not nothing."
---
He came back angrier, which I had counted on, and he was still better than he had any right to be at twenty.
An enemy Player came at my flank while we were trading, and I had to trap the strike against a panel, and Aurelian saw the exact half second where my attention went in two directions.
He put a solar knee into my abdomen.
I went backward and landed in the road between four hundred people and everything that wanted to reach them, and when I got my head up there was blood at the corner of my mouth.
He looked at it.
"See?"
I got up.
He gestured at the line behind me, the whole length of it, the soldiers and the stretchers and the people still coming out of a hole in the ground.
"They can’t protect you. They cannot even protect themselves. And you will die in a road before you admit they are beneath you."
I wiped my mouth with the side of my thumb.
"They’re weaker than me."
I put my weight back onto the front foot.
"That doesn’t put them beneath me."
And there it was, on his face, the thing I have never been able to get past in eight months of thinking about it.
He was not pretending not to understand. He genuinely could not follow the sentence. I had said something to him with the grammar of a reason in it, and he had heard noise.
He attacked again.
"Then what is any of it for?" Another strike, and another. "Why does the power exist at all, if the people holding it are still expected to take orders from people who could not stop them if they tried?"
I trapped his arm flat against a panel and held it there.
"Because being able to take something doesn’t make it yours."
He burned his way out of the hold.
"That is what weak men tell strong ones."
I hit him.
"Then stop repeating it."
---
He got separation after that, and I thought he was resetting.
He was not.
Sol Invictus was still burning over his body when he put one hand out to the side, and about four metres from him, in open air where there was nothing at all, white-gold light gathered and condensed itself into a disk.
I stopped moving.
That was not Sol Invictus. Sol Invictus is a mantle. It lives on him, it moves with him, and it does not appear four metres from his body and hang there.
Which meant it was a second Ability.
Every Player begins with one. A Core, the thing that arrives at awakening, and for most people that is the whole of it for the rest of their lives.
A very small number awaken a second later, under growth or pressure or something closer to the edge than either. A smaller number again awaken a third.
Three is the limit. Nobody has ever documented a fourth.
And they are never random. Whatever your first Ability is made of, the others are made of the same thing, because they are all coming up out of the same resonance in the same person.
Aegis, Bastion and Reprisal are all force. Lucia’s three are all cold. Marek’s three are all space.
Aurelian’s is solar.
He had been in that war eight months and he had already found his second.
> **[Aten]**
He threw it.
I put three layers in its path, one behind the other, because a single plane was not going to be enough and I knew it while I was making them.
The first burned through.
The second fractured across the whole face.
The third caught what was left, and Reprisal took all of it, and my right arm went numb to the shoulder.
That was more than four seconds’ worth. That was more than I have any business carrying at all.
The veins came up along my forearm in cords. The Bastion layer over that hand went unstable and started shedding in flakes, and I could feel the whole charge turning over inside my arm looking for a way out of it.
I had perhaps two seconds to put it into something.
Aurelian saw all of it.
So he did not give me them. He fired Aten again, and this time not at me.
Past me. At the road the civilians were crossing.
I had to open a wall behind my own back to catch it, which meant releasing the plane in front of me, which meant that when his fist arrived a half second later there was nothing between it and my ribs.
Something in there gave. I went through what was left of the outer wall and into the yard beyond it.
And the wall is where the charge went.
Not by choice. I hit it holding more than I could carry, and everything in that arm went out through my own shoulder into eleven metres of brickwork, which is why the wall came down in a section rather than a hole.
That is what saved the arm. I have been hit through a building before and I would take it again over finding out what happens when Reprisal decides for itself.
He came after me.
"You don’t even see what you are doing."
I got up out of the rubble with one arm not working properly.
"I’m getting them out."
"You are throwing yourself away for ants."