Chapter 39 - 38 — Nine Against One IV
Nine had become seven.
Samir was in a crater behind us. Marek was in one in front.
Mateo was upright on legs that Elise was running like machinery. Marta’s femur had gone somewhere past fractured. Lucia had two fingers she could no longer feel.
My ribs were done and my arms were open and the right one had begun doing something on its own between commands.
Kenji had been running Allsight for nineteen minutes at a level meant for three, and there was blood coming out of the corner of his left eye and down his cheek, and he had not mentioned it.
"I can keep four of you moving," Elise said, "for perhaps six minutes. After that I am simply lying to your bodies."
Varga stood in the middle of his own intersection with blood on his face and one arm hanging slightly wrong, and he was still standing.
I looked at the seven of them.
I had brought eight people into this district.
"You see it now," Varga said.
I did not answer.
"Two of the strongest Players on this continent, and they are underneath that road, and they are underneath it because you refuse a hierarchy that already exists." He let that sit. "How many more, Nolan? You have six left. Shall we find the number together?"
My breathing changed. I heard it happen and could not stop it, and the next order I meant to give did not come out, and the pause went on about a second too long.
He was already moving when I understood the pause had been the point.
Gravitas caught me before I had a plane anywhere.
I went through the surface of the street, and something hit the back of my head, and the world went out.
---
I came back with dust in my mouth and no idea how long.
There was no speech in my head. I want that clear, because the version people tell has one.
What I had was sound.
Lucia was still fighting. I could hear the ice going down, thinner and wronger than it should be, and still going down.
Ingrid was somewhere to my right, bleeding, moving four hundred kilos of metal with a voice that had gone to pieces.
Mateo was crawling. Actually crawling, on legs Elise was keeping upright by force of will, back toward the position he was supposed to be occupying.
Kenji was still calling transitions through one eye, and the calls were still correct.
Marta was standing on a leg I could see through her trousers.
And Elise was moving between all of them with almost nothing left, putting her hands on people in the order that kept the most of us breathing.
I had spent the last minute understanding that I had brought eight people here to die for humanity.
Lying in a hole in that road, I finally worked out that not one of them was here because I had asked.
They had chosen the same street I had. Every one of them, separately, years before I ever met most of them.
The guilt did not go anywhere. I have it still. It simply stopped being the thing at the front.
I got up.
---
"Ingrid. All of it. Now."
Every remaining piece of metal in that district came off the ground at once, and Varga had to answer it with Gravitas across a wide field.
"Marta."
She looked at me and understood exactly what I was asking, which was for her leg.
She gave it.
She accelerated from a standing start and the femur went further during the run, and blood came through the fabric before she was halfway, and she made him take Atlas to maximum because she was arriving at his face.
"NOW," Kenji shouted, "drop, DROP—"
Something went in his eye while he shouted it. I saw his head jerk. He put a hand over the left side of his face, held it there for a second, took it away and kept calling with the other one.
Lucia took Varga’s legs at the ankle.
Mateo came in from the side, and one leg gave out three strides short, and he used the fall itself and put Faultbreaker up through Varga’s ribs from the floor.
Something in Varga’s chest went.
Varga answered, and caved in the front of Mateo’s mineral plating with a weighted forearm, and I got a plane under him before the second impact could arrive.
Ingrid wrapped him.
Varga tore an arm free and sent half of it back at her as shrapnel, and I watched three pieces go into her side and one into her thigh, and she staggered and did not drop the rest of the restraints.
Then Elise took hold of my right arm.
"This is the last time," she said. "I want you to hear it properly. I can make this arm work for about forty seconds and then it is finished, and I do not mean today."
"Understood."
"Hadrian." She had not used my name in two years of operations. "I do not think you come out of this."
I did not tell her she was wrong.
We looked at each other for about a second, which is all we had, and then she put both hands on my forearm and gave me forty seconds.
---
I launched.
Varga took Atlas to maximum to stop me, which is what we wanted, and became something with the inertia of a building.
Lucia froze him from the knees down.
Ingrid held what was left of the metal locked around his chest.
Marta hit him from behind and destroyed the rest of her own leg doing it.
Mateo came in on the opposite side on a body that had died once already this afternoon.
"HIS FIELD IS OPEN," Kenji screamed.
I reached him.
Varga caught my Bastion fist in his palm and we stopped dead, both of us, with everything in the district pulling in six directions at once.
Then he brought his mass down onto the contact point.
My forearm broke inside the Bastion layer. I felt it go, and then I felt it keep going as the pressure worked at the ends of it, the bone coming out through the skin below the wrist.