Surbas disappeared behind one piece of cover. He didn’t re-emerge. The fanged imp from the feral choir, taking essential qualities from everything it devoured, casting away the rest into nothingness.
Quantity over quality, Rose thought. But still enough. Every imp a different miserable end, waiting for us.
For others.
“Evan,” Rose said. “I need you to make a break for it.”
“Oh,” Evan said. “A break for it. Past fangs and skull-bits, and two-heads, and mister tumor and stretchy-skins?”
“If we don’t catch up with you, then you need to assume we’re gone. Let others know what happened. The lawyers will like that, and I’m hoping they’ll like it enough to let you do it unmolested.”
“You want me to leave you to die,” Evan said. “To these guys.”
“No,” Ty said, under his breath, his voice cracking a little.
“Yes,” Rose said.
“Well I’m not going to,” Evan said.
“If Ellie met up with Sarah,” Rose said, “Then we need to warn her off. They were too slow.”
“Really?” Evan asked. “Tell me you’re not making stuff up to convince me. Because if they’re not here yet and Sarah wasn’t that far away, I’m thinking they aren’t coming at all.”
“Evan,” Rose said. “Go.”
She pushed a little Conquest into her voice.
Conquest, in the meanwhile, smiled.
“You lose too,” I told Conquest, as Conquest strode toward me. Seizing me, and picking me up from a landscape built piecemeal from sections of my apartment, from the art installations I’d worked on, and the places of my friends.
Memories of people who might well die in the worst way.
“If Rose dies, you die,” I said.
“I’m only a sliver,” Conquest said, simply. Wearing grandmother’s face, speaking in that infuriating way grandmother once had.
“No!” Evan’s cry reached out. “No! I’m not just going to do it because you say so! That’s now how this works!”
Conquest frowned.
Evan.
Ur had severed my connection to Evan, so he was no longer my familiar. A bond still remained.
I’d taken Evan into myself, and I’d smeared Evan’s blood on my chest, while fighting the goblin king and his weapon-collecting goblin pet.
Evan had stuck by me.
If any Abyss-stuff had seeped into me, I had to hope some Evan had too.
I took advantage of the moment of weakness on Conquest’s part, and I fought back. I tore free of Conquest’s grip, and staggered.
Then, opting to attack before Conquest could regain her footing, I lunged. In the doing, I very nearly forgot that I lacked arms. I imagined for a second that I had my wings again.
Odd, that wings I’d had for part of one very long night were more connected to me than my arms.
But I was a mess of spiritstuff, a fragment of a person.
Just like Conquest was a sliver of something greater.
I lunged, I shoved Conquest back, and then I tried to fly.
In practice, as things ceased to have any geography to them, I merely kept my distance. I backed away from Conquest, and I worked on regaining my footage.
Conquest pursued, but now that I wasn’t so battered, reduced to something small, I could put everything into scale. I removed myself from Conquest, flowed away from her grip.
The incarnation was stronger than me, occupied more space than me. We warred for our share of a space inside Rose’s being.
I’d drawn strength from Evan just being there.
Now I touched on other things. Memories of my bike. Of warm moments with friends. All the things that made me Blake. I consciously willed those things to become part of my identity again.
And, swelling just a bit, I began to push Conquest back and out.
“You said you needed a chance to think,” Peter snapped. “Well? Where are the fruits of that labor!?”
“Not now, Peter,” Rose said. Her eyes scanned the surroundings.
“When, then? After we get torn to chunks or worse by hell babies!? Or-”
Ainsley put a hand on Peter’s arm.
Peter clammed up.
“If you’re doing something, you’d better do it fast, Blake,” Rose said. “Because I don’t know how long we can hold up.”
How long I can hold up, Rose thought.
As if to give voice to that thought, Surbas leaped from the shadows. Nick twisted around, swinging his machete at the imp.
A flap of wings, and Surbas changed direction midway through the air. He landed on the diagram, and intentionally smeared the lines.
Two-headed Hauri approached, waddling, squirming, hauling itself forward with its front limbs, rather than walking. Ty, hand bloody, used his finger to draw signs in the air. Matching lines appeared in the earth. Hauri collided with the edge of the diagram, the lines pulled together just in time.
Rose wanted to send Evan away. Evan resisted, and Rose couldn’t fathom why.
I had to tell her why, and I couldn’t quite speak.
I had to pay a price, in the end.
I stared down at the sprawl of memories, individual facets that made up me, facets that made up Rose.
Reaching out, I seized cherished experiences. Cherished parts of me.
Tiff, Ty. Goosh, Joseph, Joel.
Alexis.
Far too few in number, as experiences went, half of them simply gone.
Rose had surmised that I’d been built to gather others around me. Rose had been built to sit lonely in the tower, whiling away the years. But everything had gone to shit, and now Rose was incapable of dealing with this current problem without a crutch. Without Conquest.
Handling the memories made me even more in tune with myself. Reaching out to Rose’s memories of them, to the small, few, scattered experiences she had with friendship, they helped too, showed me glimmers of smiles or gut feelings of being in a group and feeling included. She had so few. Only enough to tell her what it was, in abstract. Not to give her any true experience.
I couldn’t hold on to any, if I wanted this to work.
Not of human camaraderie, anyway. I held on to Evan, and to Green Eyes.
I gave her the rest. Pushed them onto her side. Dumped them. Hit Rose with it all at once.
All while squeezing Conquest out of her head.
A hundred memories might have flooded into her head, in that instant. Gentle ones, angry ones, helpless ones. Warm ones.
I very much felt the lack, giving them up.
I saw a full third of the memories fall by the wayside. Consumed by the fracture, the damage.
I felt the loss there, too. I could remember having the experiences and emotions, even if they no longer had a place in my heart.
Rose’s hands shook as they went to her shirt. She clutched her coat there. “Can’t.”
“What?” Alister asked her.
“I can’t do it,” she said, under her breath.
He put an arm around her shoulders, hugging her close.
There were tears in her eyes. “Fuck, Blake! He’s…giving me a taste of what I never had. I can’t do it alone.”
“What do you need?” he asked.
“What I tried to do before. I need the group.”
“What did you try before?”
“Faysal,” she said. “Faysal…”
“Faysal,” Alister said, joining in.
Nick swung his machete at the feral imp as it crept closer to the lines, clearly intent on messing them up. It took to the air, going over the machete.