The blades served two purposes. They made more wretches, casting some into the air, causing the masses to stumble and pile up. All by dividing them further. Broken vestiges even before they were divided.
The second purpose was to form a barricade. A ring of blades at the edges, ever-closing, and a barrier to block our entrance to the building.
Except there was more at play. Our circle was filled. Crammed full of wretches, many ex-human, a small few being ex-Other. Mad, senseless, savage, driven toward violence and destruction without aim, but it was a pressure from every direction, and as the number increased at the edges, they surged forward, pushed by those behind. The gaps narrowed and the ones still possessed of a glimmer of sense and sanity struggled to get away from the steadily-approaching eruption of blades.
Irony. Scary, scary irony.
We were being bound. Like bound by like. Humans and others caught up in a sea of humans and others. They pressed in on us from every direction and matched us in strength, by quantity if not quite by quality.
Even the mechanism wasn’t so different from how I’d dealt with Ur, how I’d theorized the mechanism for his ultimate defeat. Create a perimeter, then gradually draw it closed. Choke out those caught within.
There were screams and roars of pain all around us, but not so much it drowned everything out. All the same, hearing was hard when every second meant I was trying to figure out where to place my feet, how to dislodge myself from wretches that had grabbed me, making sure I was still moving in the right direction, when I was being jerked this way and that.
Paige was shouting something. I was pretty sure it was Paige, anyway. Screaming orders, warnings.
A wretch that had originated from some savage, backwoods sort of Other snapped in my face. Lipless, its face was predominated by thick triangular fangs each as long and wide as my hand. With one arm grabbed, the other arm busy sticking the Hyena into the lower portion of the wretch’s stomach, I pulled my head back as far as possible, leaning on the crowd behind em.
I twisted the blade. Something in the crowd behind me managed to dig into a space between branches to claw at Rose’s side, parting flesh with sharp nails.
Another snap of jaws, just shy of my face. I twisted the blade further, shoved it in deeper, at a sharper angle, and the wretch’s head bowed.
I slammed my wooden forehead into the wretch’s flesh and skull, and it reeled back. I hurled myself forward, away from the claws that were trying to scratch Rose and drove my head into the wretch’s chin, my hands still caught up in other struggles.
She -I was just now able to see the clues to its gender- toppled over backward, falling against the crowd in front of me, much as I had. The difference was that she was much larger than I had been. Her weight pushed smaller wretches down, just enough that her reaching hand couldn’t find solid ground to use to right herself.
I tore myself free of the crowd around me, swinging the hyena to cut at arms and hands that were reaching and seizing me, and set my foot on the fallen wretch’s ruined stomach. I pushed myself up and forward, stepping on her chest, then the shoulder of another Other just behind her, facing the wrong direction.
I had the raw strength, I had a lower body weight to go with that raw strength. I’d hoped to cover ground, moving over and on top of the crowd that was now pressing in so hard.
I made it three more carefully placed steps before something grabbed me by the ankle. I toppled forward. I didn’t try to stop myself from falling, or even to fall gracefully. Neither was possible. I brought the Hyena down into the neck of the biggest, most threatening looking wretch below me.
It was in the midst of this that Paige seemed very intent on communicating something very important. I didn’t have the focus to spare to listen.
Rose, however, did. I felt her move. I was busy trying to deal with the fact that the wretch I’d stabbed was not the most dangerous one present, and one had clawed gauntlets instead of hands, and I knew that Rose was about to complicate the situation.
I badly underestimated just how much she was going to complicate it.
She couldn’t communicate directly, whispering into my head or whatever else. She didn’t have the mechanisms for that, much as I hadn’t. I’d suspected she’d shove a memory or experience from her share of things into me. She didn’t. She gave me something of my own.
Me and Carl, in the shelter.
Carl grabbing me. Doing nothing else but talking. Bringing matters to a head, after I’d spent weeks doubting myself, already on shaky ground before his arrival. Forcing me to choose.
Would I turn my back on him, or would I plead to go back?
I’d made my decision, and I hated it. Despised that I’d once been the person who would choose the latter. Ever since, I’d fought to get further away from that person. Fought it to the point that I’d turned my back on my humanity.
I knew the full story now, how we’d been put together.
After becoming a bogeyman, I’d convinced myself the scenario wasn’t real. That I wasn’t real, and it was just a fabrication.
But Rusty, our progenitor, had gone through it. It was real.
Now, knowing that, I faced it again. I faced it and I knew that Rose saw.
That she’d looked through everything, in order to find that scene.
Me, giving up.
I remembered where I was, only just barely managed to move the Hyena to block one of the gauntlet-claws from disemboweling Rose, where she was nestled within me.
Paige was still shouting, only this time she was saying something about ‘toward the light’. I’d missed the first portion, or the last portion.
Poor choice of words, that.
Rose was stirring, and something told me that she was about to hit me with the exact same vision.
Not helpful!
But I got the message, even if I didn’t understand it.
Give up.
With that thought, Rose relaxed. She didn’t push, and she didn’t hit me with the memory again.
A second gauntlet came around, and the Hyena was already caught between the fingers of the gauntlet. I brought my knee up to block the second grasping claw, and the wretch closed pointed fingers on my shin.
I could have pulled the Hyena free, stabbed.
Something clubbed me in the side of the head, and I lost my position, falling amid knees and feet in the crowd.
I was stomped.
I tensed, found leverage, fingers gripping the Hyena.
Rose hit me with another memory, before I could lash out. Me, in a sleeping bag, beneath the bridge. Attacked by a small mob of youths, younger than I was, almost savage in expression, memories twisted by imperfect recollection.
A foot kicked past a gap in the branches, striking Rose’s stomach. I felt the pain, even if I was one step removed from it.
I snarled, and I turned over, Hyena tucked under my body, head tucked down, back hunched over.
In my peripheral vision, through gaps in the crowd of Others, I could make out blood and debris fly as blades stabbed skyward from the street. Not all that far away.
Light flared. Paige’s work, as bright to look at as the sun, and a whole lot closer. Where the light touched, here and there, flesh smoked, and an aurora shimmer of light started to dance over the broader, flatter surfaces, be it the side of a building or someone’s arm.
A half-second later, the effect really started to take hold.
One wretch swung a punch at another that was in its way. The aurora flared, much as water might splash if one punched a tranquil pool. The fist came away battered, a finger bent in the wrong way.
More explosions of light rippled around us, clusters and sporadic bursts both.