Chapter 38 - 37 — Nine Against One III
I got up.
It took longer than I want to admit and I did it in stages, and somewhere in the middle of it I put every scrap of stored force from four minutes of taking his attacks into one release at point-blank range.
> **[Reprisal]**
It threw him the length of the intersection.
It also finished my right arm for the next several minutes. The forearm went into a tremor I could not stop and my fingers would not close in sequence.
Lucia reached me before Elise could.
She looked at the arm. Then at my side, where the field dressing had gone dark and stayed dark.
"Can you continue?"
"Yes."
"That is not the question I asked."
"I know."
She did not tell me I would be fine. She did not tell me anything.
She looked at the blood coming through my clothes for about two seconds longer than a person looks at a thing they believe is survivable, and then she went back to freezing the road.
---
"I have it." Kenji’s voice, from the stairwell, thin. "Hadrian. I have it."
"Say it."
"Three Abilities, one network, one man." He was breathing in pieces. "When he takes a Horizon to maximum, his general field loses precision. Perhaps fifteen per cent. When he takes Atlas to maximum, the whole field drops for about a third of a second."
"So we cannot beat any one of them."
"No. We make him run all three at once."
That was the plan, and it was a worse plan than the one we brought, because the one we brought had Samir in it, and Samir was face down in a crater forty metres behind us.
I rebuilt it anyway, in about eleven seconds, out loud.
Ingrid took over the job of forcing the big defensive responses, because tonnes of moving metal demands a Gravitas answer whether he wants to give one or not.
Marta threatened close range on a leg she should not have been standing on, because close range demands Atlas.
Kenji called every transition.
Lucia narrowed where he could go.
Marek moved the wounded, constantly, so nobody stayed anywhere long enough to be targeted.
Mateo hit only during the Atlas drops.
Elise kept Mateo and me functioning, which is a sentence that means something worse than it reads.
And I went in only when Varga’s attention was already split three ways.
It began working.
Ingrid filled the sky. Varga answered with Gravitas. Marta went at him and made him go heavy. Kenji called the drop half a second before it came, Lucia took his footing, Mateo hit him, and I arrived last.
We did it four times with different timing, so he could not simply learn it.
By the fourth, he was bleeding from above the eye, and the thing that had been in his voice at the beginning had gone out of it.
---
Then he stopped playing our game.
Gravitas went out across the entire district.
Not a point. Not a street. All of it, and the whole ruined city began to lift.
Sections of road tore up out of their beds and hung. Vehicles rose off their sides and turned slowly in the air. The fronts came off two buildings and did not fall.
Bodies came up out of the rubble and went up with everything else, which is an image I have never found a way to describe to anybody who was not there.
Above the nine of us, several thousand tonnes of city hung in the air and waited.
Marta stopped moving.
Lucia’s frost guttered for a second and came back thinner.
And Kenji, who reads mana for a living, went the colour of the road.
"He was holding this back," he said, and I heard it perfectly across sixty metres, because everything else had gone quiet. "The whole time. He has been holding this back the entire time."
I saw Ingrid take one step toward Elise. Not a tactical step. She simply moved closer to another person.
Then Varga turned the field over.
---
The city came down.
I made the largest thing I have ever made in my life.
It was not one plane. It was eleven, layered and locked into each other over the whole formation, and it went up out of my hands in about a second and a half and I felt every centimetre of it leave me.
The first impacts sounded like the end of the world.
Lucia put Zero Frost above the shield in slabs, so the first pieces struck ice and shattered and came down as gravel rather than as a building front.
Ingrid dragged the heaviest sections away from the two places I could feel going soft.
Mateo came in behind me on ruined legs, put his shoulder into my back and his palms flat against my spine, and braced me.
And Elise put a hand between my shoulder blades and kept me conscious, because Reprisal was taking in more force than it has ever been asked to hold and it had to go somewhere.
It went into me.
My forearms split open along the outside from wrist to elbow. Blood ran down over my hands and made the grip slick against nothing, since there was nothing to grip, and my right knee went down.
"Up," Mateo said behind me. "You’re up. You’re up."
Lucia pushed past her own limit somewhere in the second minute.
Two fingers on her left hand went white and then stopped being white, and the tissue underneath darkened, and she kept the hand where it was because taking it away meant taking the ice off my shield.
"You always do this."
Varga’s voice came through the noise from somewhere above the falling city.
"Every time. Underneath everybody. Holding the roof up with your own body while people who will be dead of ordinary things in forty years shelter behind you."
A slab the size of a bus hit the shield and I felt it in my knees. "You have never once stood on top of anything, Nolan. You have spent your entire life as the floor."
I did not have the air to answer him and I would not have answered him anyway.
He was right. That is the part I have never told anybody.
He had described my whole life accurately and he had expected it to wound me, and what I actually felt, kneeling in a crater with my arms opening up, was a kind of exhausted agreement.
Yes. That is what I am. I would like to have been something else and I was not offered the choice.
Ingrid reinforced the failing side.
Lucia moved in closer.
Elise kept her hand on my back with blood running out of her nose onto her collar.
And the six of them physically held the formation together while I held the roof.
The shield lived.
When the last of it came down and the dust started to settle, I could not lower my arms.
---
"He is overextended." Kenji, immediately, hoarse. "That cost him. His precision is—"
He stopped.
Varga had already moved on to Marek.
Marek had Passage open.
Not to anywhere outside the district. He had been doing this all afternoon and it was never an evacuation, it was a shuttle.
Sixty metres at a time, out of whatever part of that street had just stopped being survivable and into whatever part had not.
The centre had just had a city dropped on it. The northern kerb had not.
So he had put a corridor between the two, and he was moving the people who could not cross sixty metres of broken ground on their own legs.
Mateo was inside it, because Mateo has no legs left that deserve the name and Elise was running them on borrowed time.
Elise was in there with him, holding him upright.
Varga set an Event Horizon two metres beside it.
The corridor distorted immediately. I saw the edges of it start to move, which is a thing spatial corridors are not supposed to do.
Marek could have closed it.
Two of them were in the corridor, and a corridor that closes on somebody does not put them out at either end.
He held it.
The blood started at his nose within four seconds. His knees went down onto the road and he kept his hands up and the corridor open, and then the blood came out of both ears at once and ran down his jaw.
Lucia saw him and started to move.
"No." He got it out with his teeth together. "No, the well, it will take you, do not—"
"Marek."
"I can’t." His face came up and I have never seen anything like it since. "Lucia, I can’t hold it and I can’t close it, I don’t have a third thing, I have looked, there is no third thing—"
He was frightened. Completely and visibly.
He did not manage to hide any of it, and he held the corridor open anyway, and I want it recorded that those two facts sat inside the same man at the same time.
Elise came out at the northern kerb with sixty kilos of ruined man over her shoulder and went down on one knee with him, and both of them were clear.
Marek closed it.
I threw Aegis at him with everything I had left in the arm.
The Event Horizon reached him first.
My plane arrived less than a metre short of where he had been. I could see the gap. I can still see the gap, in the specific way a man sees a distance he could have covered if he had been eleven days less broken.
The well took him with about forty tonnes of concrete and steel, and it compressed, and it collapsed.
Then there was a crater and nothing in it.
---
Lucia did not move.
She stood at the edge of it with one ruined hand still stretched out, and she did not lower it, and the frost on her sleeve began to melt and run.
"Lucia."
Nothing.
"Lucia. His field is loose. Right now. He spent everything he had on that Horizon."
She turned her head and looked at me, and I have been looked at by a great many people in bad situations and that one still ranks.
"He is *in there*."
"I know."
"He is in there and you are giving me a *window*."
"Yes."
"He’s been dead nine seconds."
"I know exactly how long he has been dead." My voice came out worse than I intended, and I did not have the time or the breath to fix it.
"And he bought it with the whole of himself, and in about four more seconds it stops existing, and then he will have bought nothing."
She made a sound.
Then she went back to work, and there were tears cutting lines through the frost and the dust on her face, and I wanted to be honest about what that did to her performance.
Nothing. It did nothing. Grief did not make you stronger, whatever people write afterwards.
Her damaged fingers made Zero Frost harder to shape, and the ice she laid down for the next two minutes was measurably worse than the ice she had been laying down before.