Chapter 37 - 36 — Nine Against One II
Two hundred metres.
I knew what that meant before it left my hands. I have known what that meant since I was twenty. A plane at two hundred metres arrives late and arrives thin, and I threw it anyway, because the alternative was standing in a road watching.
Varga changed it again while Samir was still rising, and the pull reversed and multiplied, and Samir came down faster than he had gone up.
My plane was still travelling.
It got there. I want that written down, because people have told me since that I did not reach him, and I did reach him.
It formed under him about a third of a second before he arrived, at the thickness two hundred metres leaves you, which is roughly the thickness of a windowpane.
He hit it.
It broke, and he did not even slow.
He struck the road head first hard enough to break the surface around him in a circle, and one arm folded under his body on impact, and his head did not finish in a position a head goes in.
The blood came out from underneath him faster than blood should.
Elise reached him first because Elise is always the one who reaches people first.
She put two fingers under his jaw.
Then she moved them and did it again, in a different place, because she did not want the first answer.
Then her hands stopped.
She did not say anything. She knelt in the road with both palms half raised and nothing to put them on, and that is how I found out.
Marta saw it from across the intersection and missed a step. Just one. She had been running and then her foot came down wrong and she stumbled, because somebody at our level had been alive four seconds ago.
We did not get to have the next part.
---
Varga turned the whole street sideways.
Down stopped being under us and became east, all at once, and eighty metres of ruined road emptied itself toward the buildings on that side.
Vehicles went across the intersection on their sides. The bodies from the previous battle came out of the rubble and went with them.
Ingrid’s stacked metal tore out of its positions and flew, and half of it was gone before she could catch any of it back.
One of Lucia’s frozen footholds cracked out of the pavement with her still standing on it.
Mateo rooted and caught my belt with one arm.
Lucia froze herself to what was left of the road.
Marta was already airborne and did something violent with her own vector that put her into a wall shoulder first instead of through a window at eighty, and her fractured leg took the correction.
Elise was the only one not anchored.
She had been kneeling beside a body.
Varga went for her the instant she came off the ground.
Mateo let go of me.
---
He hit Varga in mid-air with his whole mineralised body, took him through the front of a building, and slammed Root down the moment they hit a floor.
For about four seconds, one man held the former World Number One in place.
I was coming through the wall behind them.
Varga did not fight the hold.
He looked down at the man locked to the floor against his chest, and instead of throwing him off, he increased the gravity around him.
Mateo could not be moved. That was the entire point of what he was doing. Root had him fixed to that floor and he could not have released it fast enough to matter.
So his own body began to fail underneath him.
His left knee went first, folding the wrong way. The right twisted out and the lower leg broke through the fabric of his trousers, and he screamed, and the sound was not a fighter’s sound.
His arms came off Varga.
I abandoned my attack halfway and threw everything into getting a plane between them.
Varga dropped Atlas to nothing, moved inside my construct before it finished forming, brought his mass back at the moment of contact, and put a fist through Mateo’s mineralised chest.
The stone went in rather than out.
Mateo left the floor, hit the far wall, came down, and stopped breathing.
---
Elise came through the hole in the wall at a dead run with blood already on her lip from something earlier.
She had her hands on his chest before she was properly on her knees.
Nothing.
She swore, which I had never heard her do, and went again.
Her hands were shaking so badly on the second attempt that she had to brace one wrist with the other.
Mateo came back with a sound like a man surfacing.
"Stay down."
He was already trying to get his elbows under him.
"Mateo. Your legs are gone. Both of them. Stay *down*."
"He’s still—"
"I know what he is still doing." She had her palm flat on his sternum and was pushing him into the floor with what was left of her arm strength.
"Your heart stopped. You were dead. Do you understand the sentence I just said to you?"
"Then make it work."
"That is not what I do."
"Elise."
She looked at him for a second and a half.
Then she did the thing none of us like watching, which is not healing. It is the other one. She forced his body to keep functioning without repairing any of it, borrowing against a man who had nothing left in the account.
"When this ends," she said, "you will not stand up again. Not today, and possibly not this year. I need you to know that before I do it."
"Do it."
She did it.
He got up on legs that had no business carrying him, and I watched his face while he did, and he was terrified. He hid it badly and he hid it anyway, which is the version of courage I actually believe in.
---
Varga used the interruption on me.
"He has been asking about you," he said, and put a wall of gravity into my chest that folded Aegis inward. "Not often. He would not want you to know that."
"Do not."
"He asked whether you were injured, after the installation." Another. "I told him you were. He went out and stood in a corridor for some time."
I got two planes up and made him spend a Horizon on the second one.
"You have this backwards," he went on. "You think I found a boy and taught him. I found a boy who had already watched his father come home bleeding, four times a year, for people who could not have carried the man’s coat."
"They are people."
"He watched you do that from the age of six. And every year he asked himself the same question, and every year you gave him the same answer, and the answer never once explained the blood."
I hit him. He went heavy and took it.
"He did not learn contempt from me, Nolan. He learned arithmetic from *you*, and then he did it correctly."
"You are describing a man who burned a road full of civilians!"
"I am describing a man who understood what your life actually costs, and declined to pay it for ants."
The word came out of him flat.
My next plane formed at nine degrees off where I wanted it, and I felt it go wrong while it was leaving my hands.
Varga saw it.
Of course he did. He has been reading fighters since before I was one.
"Ah," he said.
"Where did he get that word?"
"From himself."
"Where did he get it?"
"You are asking me whether I put it in his mouth." He drifted back two metres, unhurried, while three of my planes went past where he had been. "I did not."
"It is not a rare thought, Nolan. It is what a strong man arrives at on his own on a long enough evening. All I ever did was fail to be shocked by it." He added.
That was the part that did the damage.
Not that somebody had taken my son and made him into something. That I could have fought.
He had walked into a house that did not flinch, and stayed.
---
I attacked badly after that.
I know precisely how badly, because I have replayed it for forty years and it does not improve.
I went at him three times in a row from the same distance, which I would discipline a twenty-year-old for. I opened Aegis too wide because I wanted to trap him rather than stop him.
Varga dropped Atlas to almost nothing, came through the gap in my own construct like something falling sideways, brought his mass back at contact, and put a fist into the ribs that were already broken.
Three more went.
I hit the road and could not get a full breath in, and every attempt made a sound in my chest that I did not like.
"You put him out of your house," Varga said from above me, "because he frightened you."
I got one hand under me.
"He said a thing at nineteen that you had heard in a burning street from men you had just killed, and you could not sit in a room with it."
"I had *watched them*." My voice came out wrong because there was not enough air behind it. "Two days before. A district. They went house to house."
"I know what my people did."
"You know."
"I know it was necessary and I know it was ugly, and I know you have never once in your life been able to hold those two facts at the same time."
He came down until his feet were nearly on the road. "That is why you are on the ground and I am not."