She made a sound, whimpering. She shook her head, and bugs flew free, but her hand very nearly slipped.
“I said hi! I’ve been grabbing bugs off you, least you can do is-”
“Hi,” she said, her voice tiny. “Please stop talking.”
“It’s like Tiff said,” Evan told her. “Chin up, persevere, and you can make it through.”
She shook her head, a small gesture, as if even a normal shaking of the head threatened to unseat her from her precarious position on the wall.
I edged closer to her. The bugs, and one hurt hand, and all the rest of the abuse from Eva’s beating earlier, and she was the youngest one here, Evan excepted. She needed the most help. Green Eyes was with the main pack, further ahead, and I’d have to trust them to the wall-scaling mermaid.
“I can’t move,” she said.
“You can do it,” Evan said.
“I can’t move! My… I keep getting shooting pains down my arms. The bugs are eating me, they’re eating me!”
Going shrill again.
“Channel that fear,” Evan said. “Keep moving.”
“Fucking bird! I will grab you and I will take you down with me if you don’t shut up!” Roxanne shrieked.
Evan looked up at me, helpless.
I was only about fifteen feet away.
“I’m going inside,” she said. “I can’t- I can’t-”
Evan flew away as she reached a window, climbing in past broken glass with enough panic fueling her actions that she wasn’t careful.
Evan landed on my shoulder.
“It’s okay,’ I said. “You tried. Help Kathryn.”
It took me ten long seconds to reach that same window.
“Roxanne,” I said, peering inside.
The interior was haphazard, the floor tilted so the left side was lower on the left, the right too high. At the other end of the hallway, maybe twenty feet away, it was the opposite. A window marked the exit onto the other side of the building.
Impossibly tall and broad, it was only twenty or so feet thick, here. One room thick.
My cousin was sitting on the floor at the base of the window, head buried in her arms.
“Roxanne,” I said. “If we don’t go, we’re going to get separated. There’s no going back home if that happens. We need Ty to draw the circle.”
“It hurts. I’ll… I’ll walk inside. It’s not as cold in here.”
“The place will mess with your head, and it’ll lead you away from them. There’ll be places, I’m sure, that won’t have routes, understand? This place is under no obligation to be convenient. Just the opposite. It’ll let you think you can follow them, and then you’ll hit a dead end, and you’ll have to go outside, on the wrong side of the building. This is what it wants.”
“Roxanne… what would your dad say?”
“Dad?”
“Uncle Paul.”
“He’d say… I don’t know.”
“Then I’ll take a stab at it,” I said. “He might tell you that all the others are coping. They’re dealing.”
“Bugs aren’t eating them!”
She looked up at me as she said it. The rents in her flesh, the scars, were reminiscent of how Callan had died, the poison eating along the paths his veins marked in his skin.
“They’ve got their own stuff to deal with. But the place is going to try to scatter us. It’s going to fuck with everyone, in turn. Do you want to be the one who failed and got lost, when everyone else succeeded?”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “I’m not some stupid idiot that can be convinced like that.”
“Roxanne,” I said, my voice quiet. “Man the fuck up. You don’t get to give up here. For once in your life, you don’t get a second chance.”
Oh god. I had so many memories of my dad and Uncle Paul talking in just that tone.
I didn’t stop. “This place, it has a kind of intelligence. Think of it as a person, doing its utmost to fuck with you. Okay? Fuck with it back. Win. Get out of here.“
It was a language she spoke. It struck home.
Mute, nodding, she found her feet. I offered her a hand and she took it.
She startled.
Three feet away from us was a man in a rumpled business suit, tie too tight at his neck. His hair was mussed up, like he’d just woken up. His sleeves barely reached past the halfway point on his forearms, and he wore no socks or shoes. Hands and feet both were covered in deep gouges that disappeared beneath the fabric of his suit. His face pulled into a wide grimace, not quite a frown, not quite a smile, just pain and ugliness, every one of his teeth visible, even the molars and wisdom teeth.
There had been zero sign of his approach. Not a sound.
“No,” I told him, firm.
His lips moved too fluidly as he closed his mouth, licking his lips for a moment. The mouth closed, lips moist, but it was almost out of place on his face, like it wasn’t centered.
“Okay,” he said, barely opening his mouth.
I kept a wary eye on him as Roxanne eased her way out of the window.
He didn’t move.
“My hand,” she said. “It’s hard.”
I watched the man in the ill-fitting suit as I followed her out, straddling the window and finding a foothold.
“Climb onto my back,” I told her. “Focus on holding on.”
The man didn’t budge an inch. He didn’t shift his weight, barely breathed…
Roxanne found handholds in the branches at my left shoulder and the open hole at my right side. Her legs wrapped around my midsection.
I inched away, getting as far as I could from the window before I turned to look for the next handhold.
“You stink,” she said. “Like gutterstuff.”
“Cope,” I told her.
The main group was so far away. Three-quarters of the way to where we needed to be. Kathy was still below, but she was halfway or so.
We’d almost backtracked.
I wanted to be there before they went inside, because all signs pointed to these apartments being occupied.
I looked back toward the window just in time to see the man’s head emerge. Slower and more fluidly than a person should be able to move, his head at an angle that would have only worked if he were lying down or standing on a wall, it was more like a puppeteer was extending a cardboard cut-out through the open window. His bloody, cut-up hands emerged, a bit too late, gripping the windowsill firmly.
His expression was neutral as he stared.
I edged away, and against my better judgment, I took risks, reaching further, testing things less carefully. My body was strong and it didn’t get tired, allowing me to rely more on one grip.
I saw one Other emerge, then another, poking their heads out of windows three floors above Kathryn.
Clowns, female, their paint smeared on so thick that it made their flesh look like paper mache. The colored-in parts looked half-done, like it was smeared on in crayon, pastels, or charcoal.
The noose fell, missing Kathryn.
I redoubled my efforts, striving to cover more ground.
They reeled it in double-time, until the noose was halfway between them and Kathryn, and let it drop again.
Evan flew up, wings flapping, and the noose moved aside before it could settle around her neck.
The lights around Kathryn went out, and the next attempt was conducted in near-pitch darkness.