I spiraled, and it wasn’t a good sort of spiral. Not a slow one. It was the sort of spinning descent that made it impossible to get my bearings in time.
Evan gave me a slight push, to counteract the drop, but it was a small thing compared to terminal descent.
I -we– crashed into the railing at the side of the pillar. The papercut girl was scattered into thousands of individual bloodstained pages, and I was sent through the stairs, still descending, left to crash at a diagonal angle into the bookcases above the next set of stairs.
I exhaled slowly. The damaged shelves had pierced my body, trashing my midsection and my haphazardly repaired leg. My head still hadn’t fully recovered from the brief skirmish with the Barber.
Yet, as I remained there, temporarily a part of the bookshelf, I could feel my body stirring to life, taking splinters of wood into itself, repairing that damage.
My enemy, too, was pulling herself together. The impact had been nothing to her.
But the wound delivered to her book might never heal.
I could see the rest of this area, with similar pillars, differing in how they were climbed, the ground floor with its rows and columns of bookshelves, and the lost souls and Others that were milling about, yet to find an equilibrium.
Pockets of chaos.
I closed my eyes, and I heard the bells.
Was it even Molly anymore?
Was I even Blake? Or Rusty?
“Are you dead? Please don’t be dead,” Evan said.
“Alive,” I said, my voice a murmur.
“You shouldn’t keep doing this,” he said.
“I have to,” I said. “Have to get the others out.”
I pulled myself free of the book case, and hopped down. My landing was a crash landing, not helped by the state of my left leg. It was only partially intact.
The papercut girl stood on a bookshelf that was as tall as a two-story house. It swayed with her negligible weight, threatening to topple and take the other bookshelves around it like so many dominoes.
I turned to head up the stairs, and she took flight, dissolving into a flurry of windborne papers.
Intent on interrupting my forward progress.
Right. Change of plans.
I turned, dropping one wing, steering myself toward the pillar. I landed, bracing myself with one hand and both feet, and was utterly unsurprised as the shelf under my feet gave way.
I found fresher footing. My eye was fixed on the spine of a book. The Killing of Angels.
I turned my eyes away.
“She’s coming!”
I braced myself with my wing and used my free hand to seize a candle.
“That’s fire, Blake! Fire bad! You’re made of wood, remember?”
I passed the candle into my mouth, biting into it.
“That’s fire very close to your hair and your head, Blake!”
I took flight, pushing off and away from the shelves.
The papercut girl was drifting, riding the currents of hot air that rose from innumerable bookcases with a lonely candle on every other shelf. She saw me move and gave chase. Arms became great collections of paper, broad. Wings to match my own. Only she could fly. Her dress and hair moved in the wind, not rising, but only shuffling their flipbook shuffle.
I fought to ascend. Both to catch up with the others and to stay above her. But I needed Evan’s help, and she could fly with ease.
She matched me in height, and for a moment, we made eye contact.
I would have spoken to her, but I still held the candle, clamped in my teeth.
I charged her. A bit of a dive, then rising. She countered by moving skyward, then dropping. Evading, doing the reverse of what I did.
As she was lower than me, I spat the candle out at her.
As attacks went, it was meager, pathetic. It didn’t even reach her, and it was stupid to imagine the candle might have remained lit while one flew through the air.
She watched it spiral down, and looked up at me with a mean smirk on her face.
Her eyes widened as she saw me flying straight at her again.
She scattered, turning into pages, each one slicing past me. Many slicing at the flesh of my face and eyelids.
“Evan, the book!” I called out. “Thick clumps!”
He abandoned me. Taking my ability to fly.
My instructions had been vague, short, nonsensical, but Evan and I were on the same page, so to speak.
He flew into the midst of the papercut girl, and I saw him flip over, hit hard by one flying piece of paper.
But he recovered, and he evaded the next attack. Ironic, but he evaded the aimed blows better than the one that was very possibly incidental or accidental.
I twisted my face away from the attacks that still struck it, to little avail.
Evan, for his part, found what we were looking for.
The papercut girl couldn’t abandon her book. Even like this, she had to carry it with her. The book was supported by papers around it, a parachute or hang glider, hidden, masked.
Evan hit the book free of its protective sheath, sending it spiraling end over end.
I dove for it. So did the papercut girl.
She reached it first, and rematerialized part of a body around it, torso, face, arms, but not head, not legs or stomach. She hugged it to her chest.
She wasn’t in a position to move out of the way. I folded my wing, Hyena extended, and touched the sides of her book with the toes of both feet. I plummeted with it, touching the Hyena to the cover.
Her expression changed as the wind rifled through the pages of her head. Fear.
“Swear. Never harm another soul!” I shouted.
I could hear the bell’s protest.
She touched her hand to her heart. To the book. Her lips moved, but no sound came out, only the rustle of pages.
I kicked off, pushed away, sending the book through her paper body, scattering it.
Evan and I took flight. I flew in lazy, gliding circles around the pillar, higher with each circle, counterclockwise to the stairway’s clockwise rotation.
I wanted nothing more than to catch up with the others.
But, for just one rotation, flying around the pillar, I worked only to glide. To observe, to listen.
I saw the Barber on the ground. Six stories down, but he was unmistakeable. Cutting through hordes, reveling in the chaos. A limb cut free here, a hand around an individual’s face while the scissors passed through to snip off a tongue.
He threw the gurgling Other to one side, and met another head on.
The black-feathered Other clawed at him, dug talons in and then twisted away, taking pounds of flesh in the process. Yet somehow, with all the damage that was done, the Barber wasn’t any less.
I could see the body language of the Other and the observers change, as they realized that something was off. Wrong.
The Barber took that opening, stabbing. And the Barber cut.
With one hand, the Barber tore.
I could see an entire crowd back away from the Barber, with that action, as if the tearing were so great an action it had a shockwave, capable of parting a sea of monsters.
The Barber’s arms remained extended out to either side, his body bloody, as the two halves rose. A raven man that had been skinned and feathered. A twisted non-human that was twisted, broken, a wretch even among the sad and desolate souls of the Abyss.
He didn’t move, nor did he drop his arms as each half lunged, attacking Others on either side of him. It was only when the skinned birdman tossed a body his way that he let his hands drop, a two-handed grip on the shears, spearing the victim in the side.
He used both hands, angling the shears, as he starting to cut yet another victim.