“You…you caught me?” she said aloud, still stunned.
He groaned and fell to his knees. “My scrumming back…Consider my debt repaid,” he snarled.
She looked at herself. She was trembling, absolutely covered in blood, and she still clutched the gravity device in her hands. It looked like two plates connected with cloth bands — one for your belly, one for your back — and one plate had a series of little dials on it.
She stammered out, “I…I…”
“You must have sabotaged the device he was using to float,” said Gregor. He looked up at the bedsheets above, which were all spattered with gore. “Causing his gravity to collapse, crushing him. Somewhere in the street is probably a fleshy marble that was once the whole of that man’s body.” He looked around. “Help me up. Now!”
“Why? That’s all of them, right?”
“No, that was just seven! There were nine in tota—”
Gregor never got the chance to finish. Because then the remaining two attackers crested the peaks of the roofs on one side of the street, and fired.
Sancia’s adrenaline was still running strong, so the world still seemed terribly slow and clear, every second sliding by like the slice of a razor.
She watched the two men take positions on the roof, her eyes catching every gesture and movement. She knew there was no running from them, no shelter, no trick up her sleeve. She and Gregor were exposed in the alley, unarmed, with nowhere to run.
Clef’s voice roared in her ear: <TOUCH ME TO THE GRAVITY RIG! NOW, NOW, NOW!>
Sancia didn’t stop to think. She ripped Clef off the string around her neck and stabbed him down to the bloody plates in her lap.
Their attackers loosed their bolts. She watched helplessly as the scrived bolts leapt forth from their espringal pockets like fish jumping out of the water to catch an unsuspecting fly.
She felt metal strike metal as Clef touched the gravity plate. And then…
A curious pressure fell across Sancia’s body, and her stomach fluttered unpleasantly, like she was falling again — but she was standing still. Wasn’t she?
But then, everything seemed to be standing still. The bolts weren’t flying forward anymore — they hung limply in the air. The attackers were like statues stuck to the walls. The hanging clothes were barely rippling anymore — a curl of a bedsheet hanging above the alley almost perfectly still, like icing on a cake.
Sancia looked around at the drifting world, dazed. “What the hell…”
She was still touching Clef, and he was still stuck to the gravity plate, and she heard his voice whispering, speaking, chanting. She couldn’t understand what he was saying, but she could tell he was doing…something to the device.
Then she and Gregor slowly started to float off the ground, rising up as if they had no weight at all.
She heard Gregor crying out, “What the devil?”
Clef’s chanting filled her ears. She dimly realized he was making the rig work for him, making it do something it was not meant to do, something it should have never been able to do.
Because from what she’d seen that night, these gravity rigs only affected the gravity of the person wearing them — yet Clef was now somehow using this rig to control the gravity of everything around them.
Other objects began to float into the air, barrels and bags and firebaskets and the body of one of their attackers, festooned with laundry. The two attackers on the walls began screaming in terror as they helplessly floated off the building fronts, slowly turning end over end.
Clef’s voice overpowered her thoughts, filling her mind. His strange chanting grew louder.
How is he doing this? she thought. How can he possibly be doing this?
Then her scar grew hot, and she heard something, smelled something, saw something…
A vision.
A vast, sandy plain. Tiny stars twinkling above. The sky at dusk, dark and purpled at the horizon.
There was a man on the plain, wearing robes. And in his hand, a wink of gold.
He raised the golden thing, and then…
The stars began dying, one by one. Snuffed out as if they were but candle flames.
Darkness fell.
Sancia heard herself screaming in terror. The vision bled out of her mind and the world returned to her, with Gregor and all the random objects floating in the muddy fairway, the barrels and the firebaskets and the bolts.
She watched as the two bolts slowly, slowly flipped in midair, changing direction so they pointed not at Sancia and Gregor but rather at the men who had fired them.
The bolts trembled with pent-up energy. The men, realizing what was about to happen, shrieked in naked terror.
Clef said a single word, and the bolts hurtled forward. They flew so fast they almost fell apart in the air. When the bolts struck the men, they punched through their bodies as if their ribs and stomachs were made of soft gelatin, shredding them effortlessly, like scythes parting soft, green grasses.
Clef’s chanting halted. Instantly, Gregor, Sancia, the floating corpses, and all the other levitating things in the fairway crashed to the ground.
For a moment they just lay there. Then Gregor sat up and peered at the bodies lying in the mud.
“They’re…They’re dead.” He looked at Sancia. “How…How did you do that?”
Sancia’s mind was still whirling, but she had wit enough to slip Clef up her sleeve before Gregor could see him. <Was that…Was that you, Clef?> she asked him.
Clef was silent.
<Clef? Clef, are you there?>
Nothing. She looked at the gravity plates, and saw the device was now melted and smeared, like Clef’s manipulations had burned the thing out.
“How did you do that?” demanded Gregor again. For once, the captain looked genuinely shaken.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know?”
“No!” she shouted. “No, no! I don’t even know if I did do that!”
She sat there in the fairway, bewildered and exhausted. Gregor watched her, wary.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said wearily. “There could be more of them. Last time they called in a whole damn army! There could b—”
She stopped talking as a black, unmarked carriage rattled into the fairway.
“Shit,” she sighed.
Gregor scrambled through the mud, grabbed his espringal, and pointed it at the carriage — but then he lowered it, surprised.
The carriage pulled up in front of them. A young, rather pretty girl wearing gold-and-yellow robes peered out of the cockpit window. “Get in, Captain,” she said. “Now.” She looked at Sancia. “You too.”
“Miss Berenice?” said the captain, astonished.
“Now means now,” she said.
The captain hobbled around and started climbing in on the other side of the cockpit. “I’m not going to have to make you get in this thing, am I?” he asked Sancia.
Sancia briefly calculated the risks. She had absolutely no idea who in the hell this girl was. But with the captain’s bond still on her ankle, Clef suddenly dead and silent, and the whole of the Commons suddenly deeply unsafe for her, she had few choices.
She climbed in the back, and the carriage took off toward the Dandolo Chartered campo.