“Not dying, Evan.”
“Do you need help moving? I work my mojo and help lift, like this,” he said. Tiny talons grasped a branch at my shoulder. He tugged, flapping his wings.
“I just need to think for five seconds,” I said. “Where’s Green Eyes?”
“Close. She found a hiding spot.”
“Good. So long as she’s safe. Something’s going on with the bell.”
“Something’s going on with you. Guy extends his hand, and you shake it with a broken sword? Except you stabbed it, so that’s, I dunno, it’s like someone goes in for a fist bump and you shake it instead, but way, way worse. Even if he’s a bit of a jerk, that’s-”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“Looked like you.”
“Evan,” I said. “Molly stepped in. She doesn’t want anyone making deals with the Behaims. What I did there, I didn’t do by choice. She interrupted the deal, stopped it from happening.”
“Oh.”
I began to climb to my feet. Wood creaked and snapped, my midsection precariously close to breaking in half. There wasn’t any structural integrity there. I had to lean against the wall. I wasn’t quite in an alley, but it was a narrow bit of one-lane road that almost didn’t qualify as a road. The building next to me might have been a small cinema, once, but there were only patches of differently-painted brickwork now where the big signs had been. My fingertips dug into the parts of the brickwork where the weather had eroded the mortar, much as I’d climbed on the walls in the Tenements.
“Same problem we’ve been running into for the last while,” I said. “Can’t break the pattern.”
“Rose said something similar, a few days ago. About your gran and the diaries, or something.”
I could hear Evan, but I couldn’t place him. I looked at my shoulder, where I’d last felt him perch, and he wasn’t there.
A moment later, I found him, perched within the gaping hole in my abdomen.
“What did she say, specifically?”
“That, um, your gran struggled to change stuff, according to the diary.”
“Elaborate?”
“Can’t. That’s all Rose said.”
“Right,” I said. “Damn.”
Rose had deterred me from reading the diaries, way back near the beginning. Back when she’d lied about knowing who we were and where we’d come from, when she’d lied about doing the ritual.
Now, just recently, it had come up again. Rose thought the diaries might have clued me into what I was, and the true origins. That we were cut from the same metaphorical cloth.
I needed to read those diaries.
But it wasn’t like I was going to get a few days to just sit down and read anytime soon.
As I made my way back to the main street, I could see the Others that the Behaims had been keeping as protection. Will, the guy I’d very nearly slashed, had managed to wrangle most or all of the clockwork people. There were other Others, however, who were very clearly free. Zeitgeists and bogeymen from film.
The clockwork people were assuming a defensive position, facing off against Others who had been the Behaim’s allies until only moments ago.
They backed off as Alister’s clockwork knight stepped forward.
That knight apparently spooked them. Because they could see something I couldn’t, maybe, or because they had knowledge I didn’t.
I could step in to help. Flank the attackers, save the Behaims.
I wasn’t sure that I should.
Would it make a difference? I suspected the Behaims had things well in hand.
But helping the guy I’d just been planning to kill, someone who was arguing for all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons, someone who’d participated in the attack and quite possibly sent that ken-doll clockwork man to pry the library doors open? It was kind of hypocritical to turn around and save his life. I hadn’t changed my mind on anything between the time I’d tried to kill him and now.
On the other hand, it was maybe poor form to go from almost accepting a deal with the Behaims to joining the other guys in attacking them.
“Any wisdom, Evan? I feel like I should step in, but rationally…”
“No,” he said. “Not much wisdom here. My brain is roughly the size of a corn kernel, I haven’t had a heartbeat for half a year, about. I’m pretty sure I’m brain dead, technically.”
“Don’t make excuses. You learned to play poker.”
“This is more complicated than poker,” Evan said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely more complicated than poker.”
“I cheated, anyway.”
“Yeah.”
I turned my back on the scene.
There was far more movement than before. Other attacking Other. Further down the street, a pack of people ran. Moving in something pretty damn close to a formation. Unpracticed, driven by necessity and a bit of intelligence.
Back in December, I might have been one of the people running. Now I was one of the monsters. I didn’t rush, and I didn’t run. I couldn’t, with the holes in my body, for one thing, but I was trying to get a sense of the situation and make sure I didn’t rush headlong into trouble.
I was, I realized, approaching the spot where the Others and the practitioners were meeting. Where the chaos was thickest.
My mind was whirling. Trying to figure out a direction. Even the Behaims were too strong to touch.
I’d planned to pick people off, to find a chink in the armor and exploit it. But the metaphorical armor didn’t have many cracks. Molly was doing the same thing I’d planned, and Molly had been exploited.
I didn’t want to be a pawn, but ever since the beginning, I’d been a bit of driftwood in a roiling tide. A part of a much greater machine. I’d struggled to bring about change… and I wasn’t sure I liked how I’d succeeded, if I’d succeeded.
“In the interest of making it less complicated,” I said. “Our biggest enemy isn’t the Behaims, or Conquest, or the demons. It’s the status quo. I guess I didn’t realize how much reality wanted to hold onto it.”
“What do we do, then? Go back to Ty and the others?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to see them. If there was something to do, that was one thing, but if I was going back and all I was doing was telling them I knew they’d effectively betrayed me?
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to, and I don’t think it would help. We wanted to create an opening, and… I guess Molly created a bigger one. We just need to figure out how to use this, before things start settling down.”
“Before dawn,” Evan said.
“That’s the most obvious deadline,” I replied. “I think this may be the most critical point. What happens before dawn determines what happens during the day, and everything after that.
A tall Other strode into the middle of the street. He wore what appeared to be a black skirt that trailed from a heavy belt that was about a foot tall. His chest was bare, and what looked to be disconnected bike or chainsaw chains trailed from his waist, arms, and neck, each chain ending in something wickedly sharp. Sawblades or caltrops of welded-together nails. He had long hair and an almost feminine cast to his features, owing to a lack of body fat, but he still looked eminently masculine. The muscles and the scarred skin helped on that front.