Chapter 36 - 35 — Nine Against One I
**POV: Hadrian Nolan**
---
The road had been pressed down.
Not cratered. Pressed, over about forty metres, so that the whole surface sat four or five metres lower than the kerbs on either side of it and the drains stood proud of the asphalt like teeth.
There was a truck in the fourth floor of the building on our left. Not through the wall. Sitting in it, wheels down, as though somebody had parked it there.
Two of the towers along the eastern side had not collapsed.
That is the part I want to be precise about, because collapse is what buildings do. These had not shed a floor or folded into their own footprints.
They had come out of their foundations whole and gone over as single objects, the way a felled tree goes over, and landed against one another with every window still in its frame and the glass still in most of them.
They were lying on their sides in the street with their faces pointing at the sky.
Which means that for some number of seconds, down had been east, and it had been east for the buildings and everybody inside them at the same time.
There were bodies in the wreckage above our heads.
Some of them had come to rest in gutters four storeys up, and there is no version of walking underneath that which does not make you want to look at your boots.
"You are turning like an old man," Marek said.
"I am forty-five."
"You are turning like a man of ninety who has been shot." He did not look at me while he said it. He was reading the tower angles the way he reads everything, working out where he could put an exit. "Ribs?"
"Two. Possibly three."
"And you did not mention this."
"You would have been insufferable."
"I am insufferable now, so the arithmetic did not work." He stepped over a section of road standing on edge. "Eleven days ago you fought a man half your age and let him leave, and now you are here with a hole in your side."
Lucia had turned her head slightly, listening while pretending not to.
"Is there a question in this?"
"No." He clapped my shoulder, which hurt, and which I think he knew. "There is no question. I am simply establishing, in front of a witness, that I said something."
Lucia looked away, back down the ruined street, and whatever had almost been on her face went off it.
---
There were nine of us.
Marek Ilyin and Lucia Serrano I had fought beside for two years. The others I knew by reputation and by the fronts they had been holding, which in this war is a closer acquaintance than it sounds.
Nobody gave a briefing. There was nothing left to say that had not been said in a tent the night before, so instead everybody simply went where they belonged.
Kenji Arakawa climbed the only intact stairwell on the northern side, because he needs a line of sight to everything and nothing to a target.
Elise Laurent stayed in the middle of the formation and did not go forward at any point, and neither Marta nor Ingrid had to be told to close in front of her. She is the reason any of us expected to come home.
Samir Qadir went two hundred metres back and put himself in a doorway with an angle down the whole intersection.
Ingrid Falk started pulling metal out of the rubble before we had finished walking in. Reinforcing bar, a wheel hub, half a lamp standard, all of it drifting into loose stacks beside her where she could reach it later.
Marta Kovács did not stop moving. She has not stood still in front of me once in two years, because whatever she does works better if she has already begun.
Mateo Rojas took station a few metres off my left shoulder, which is where the second anchor goes.
Marek stood loose, hands empty, ready to be anywhere.
And Lucia began laying frost through the rubble in long paths, freezing the footing where she wanted us and leaving the rest.
Then Kenji stopped walking.
His hand came up off the rail and he went absolutely rigid, and I heard him stop breathing from twelve metres away, which is a thing you notice in a quiet street.
I followed his eyes up.
---
Elias Varga was hovering over the middle of the intersection.
Not high. Fifteen metres, perhaps, with his coat hanging straight down and nothing holding him up, in the middle of a district he had pressed flat eleven days earlier.
There was no army with him.
No unit, no guard, nobody on the rooftops. He had known we were coming, and he had come out to the same street on his own, and he had been waiting there long enough to be bored.
"Nolan."
His voice carried without effort in a way I have only heard from two other people.
"They sent nine. I thought perhaps twelve."
I did not answer him.
"How is your son?"
My grip closed on nothing.
"He was disappointed," Varga said, "that you let him walk. He has not said so. He does not have to."
"You will not do this."
"I am not doing anything. You put him on a road with no name and nowhere to be, and eleven days later he was standing in my hall." He tilted his head. "I did not go and find him, Nolan. He walked."
"He was nineteen."
"He was nineteen when you decided what he was. I only agreed with him."
I was aware, distantly, that I had been looking at him for too long, and that my weight had gone forward onto the front foot, and that Marek was three metres to my right doing absolutely nothing about it.
He could have said something. He is usually the one who says something.
He let me stand in it, which is the kindest thing anybody did for me that day.
Then Varga’s eyes went along the line of us, and I watched him do it.
I watched him work out which one of us was the eyes and which one was the healer, and I understood he had done this before against people better prepared than us.
"You have brought a very good team," he said. "I would like you to know that I noticed."
Kenji shouted.
---
I did not hear the words. The pressure arrived before the sound did.
> **[Gravitas]**
The whole intersection went down at once.
Not a push. A change in what down meant, applied to eighty metres of street, and the difference between those two things is the difference between being hit and simply weighing four times what you did a second ago.
I went to one knee on ribs that were already broken, and something behind my eyes went white for a moment.
Mateo anchored and the road broke underneath his boots anyway, and he sank into it up to the ankle.
Lucia froze herself flat to the pavement before her knees could fold.
Marta was mid-stride when it landed. She tried to accelerate through it and went over onto her shoulder before her second foot came down.
Samir simply lost his stance. I heard his weapon go into the doorframe two hundred metres away.
I got a plane out beneath all of us and spread it as wide as I have ever spread one, trying to carry the load across the whole formation rather than through nine separate spines.
It cracked in under three seconds.
Nine of the strongest Players alive, and in the opening exchange we were on the ground, and he had not moved from where he was hanging.
I heard Marta swear from somewhere behind me, and it was not the swearing of a woman who is angry.
I have been in that noise before. It is what a good fighter sounds like the moment they understand they may have come to the place where they are going to die.
---
"Left." Kenji’s voice cracked across the intersection. "His left is thin, it is THIN, go now."
Marta went.
She had been building since the moment she hit the ground, and whatever she does, she does it by putting momentum somewhere and keeping it, so what left the road was not a woman running. It was a woman arriving.
She came around Varga’s blind quarter and put a heel into his ribs with two hundred metres of stored acceleration behind it.
The shockwave took the glass out of everything still standing on that side of the street.
Varga moved about forty centimetres.
> **[Atlas]**
He had gone heavy at the moment of contact. I do not know what he weighed in that half second and I am not sure the question means anything, but Marta’s ankle took every bit of the recoil that he did not.
I heard it go.
Marek was there before she had finished falling, and the two of them were forty metres away by the time Varga’s hand came around.
Samir fired from the doorway.
His attack does not travel as anything you can see. It arrives as a line of compressed sound that takes a wall out at the studs.
> **[Event Horizon]**
Varga put a point of gravity in the air to his right, and Samir’s shot bent toward it like water going down a drain, and so did four windows, a road sign and eighty kilos of loose masonry.
"Now!" Kenji’s voice had gone hoarse. "He is spending on the Horizon, his field is loose, NOW."
I threw a plane flat under Mateo and drove it upward.
Mateo went from stone-skinned to airborne in one movement and came down on Varga with Faultbreaker, and that was the first thing all day that actually moved the man.
Varga went backward through the air.
Ingrid’s metal came around him before he stopped, four hundred kilos of reinforcing bar wrapping his arms and chest.
Lucia froze it. The steel went white and the give went out of it.
And I crossed the last of the distance with Bastion on both arms and hit him in the centre of the chest.
He came down into the road.
When he got his feet under himself there was blood at the corner of his mouth.
---
Nobody said anything.
But Marta stopped favouring her ankle for about half a second, which she should not have been able to do. Samir’s shoulders came down two inches. Lucia looked across the intersection at me and something in her face changed shape.
Nine of us had walked into that district genuinely unsure whether he could be hurt at all.
He could bleed. It was on his chin. We had all seen it.
I want to record that we were happy about it, briefly, in a way none of us would have admitted, and that it was the last uncomplicated thing that happened to any of us that afternoon.
Because then Varga wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked at it, and then looked at our formation.
Not at me. At the shape of us. The distances between people.
I have watched men do that on four continents.
He had stopped fighting and started reading.
---
He went for Samir first, and that was correct, because Samir was the reason he had spent a Horizon.
Samir was two hundred metres out in a doorway with the next shot half prepared.
The gravity under him inverted.
He went up out of that doorway like something dropped from the sky in reverse, forty metres of it in about a second, and Marek was already turning and was not going to get there.
I threw a plane after him.